Airborne - The Hanover Restoration (2 page)

No, no, no!
I didn’t want to be a country girl. This was not my milieu. Insidious, that’s what it was. Enticing me with a miniature railway, then dangling a forest in front of me. It wasn’t fair.

But I’d known the baron was an inventor. Yet I’d thought—yes, I admit it—I’d thought he was just another noble dilettante, playing at invention. But this toy train was . . . noteworthy. A proper welcome for the daughter of Josiah Galsworthy.

We came out of the trees, and I almost screamed. I’m not a screamer, really, but the sight of a massive stone wall a scant ten feet in front of us was surely enough to shake the strongest nerves. Drummond never slowed the engine’s pace. We plunged straight through the wall, double wooden gates swinging wide at the engine’s touch. And there it was, spread out on a low rise of land a hundred yards away. Stonegrave Abbey. A sprawling mass of ancient gray stone, incongruously topped by what appeared to be three floors of the honey gold sandstone that distinguished the architecture in Oxford and Bath. I’d spent most of my life in a narrow, newly constructed townhouse on the northern edge of Regency Park, but Stonegrave Abbey . . . Stonegrave Abbey dwarfed even Buckingham Palace, its foundations as ancient as four or five hundred years.

Oh. My.

Drummond turned his head, flashing an encouraging smile and waving his free hand toward the Abbey. House proud. Well, he had a right to be. Not that Stonegrave Abbey was as graceful or handsome as a home built in one style from the ground up, but it was impressive. I’d need a map to find my way around.

Afte
r rumbling past the somber
stone walls of the Abbey’s ground floor, Drummond brought the small locomotive to a halt before an entrance at the rear. The massive carved wooden door, the only opening in a windowless eight-foot wall of stone, was more intimidating than welcoming. I could easily imagine young men, some of them mere boys, quailing as they stood before the door, knowing that only death could free them from this place.

Goosebumps.

Too much imagination, my besetting sin. Undoubtedly, most of the young men went with a ready will. I hoped.

“If you’ll follow me, Miss,” Drummond said as he unlatched the door to my compartment and handed me out. I was beginning to feel like a tail dragging from the Scotsman’s kilt, but I did as I was told.

The carved oak door opened into a vast stone-walled corridor with steps leading down to a level at least six feet below the ground. I blinked in the sudden dimness, grateful when Drummond took my elbow and guided me down the stairs.

“Lord Rochefort wishes to greet you himself.” Drummond pulled a tasseled cord that hung from the ceiling. “I’ll be off now, seeing your trunk to your room.” For the first time he seemed a bit ill at ease, fidgeting a moment with the great silver buckle on the white belt draped catty corner across his chest. “Ye’ll find this household a bit strange perhaps, Miss, but there’s nothing to fear. Good people live here. They’re just a wee bit . . . different.”

Oddly, I was relieved. “
Different
is a word I understood. “Mister . . . ah–Drummond. I will do my best to adapt.”

“Very good, Miss.”

I heard an odd hiss, a faint slithering sound.
Dear God, what now?

I’d thought the miniature railway amazing. This contraption was in a whole new category. A small single-seat vehicle slid into view—just a single seat with a horizontal hand-hold bar in front. “If you’ll board, Miss,” Drummond said, “I will demonstrate how it works.”

Obviously, this was my day to be amazed. I, who had thought myself a sophisticated Londoner, raised in a free-thinking household where talk of exceedingly odd inventions was a daily occurrence . . . I, who thought herself inured to surprises, simply gaped. I’d missed the single rail fitted in the stone floor, but, beyond that, how on earth did this amazing device work?

“Miss . . . Miss?” Drummond was holding out his hand. “Allow me to take your bag, Miss. I’ll see it gets to your room along with your trunk.”

I handed him my carpet bag but continued to eye the seat on the mechanical device with some trepidation. It did not appear remotely adequate to accommodate a crinoline, two petticoats, and a traveling costume. “Clockwork?” I asked.

“I’m sure I can’t say, Miss. I let his lordship have his little secrets.” Drummond held out his free hand, ready to help me onto the mechanical marvel.

Hold your head high, Minta, and board the blasted thing!
There he was again. Josiah Galsworthy, inventor
extraordinaire.

Fine. And if my petticoats caught in the mechanism, pulling me to the floor, to be run over by this self-propelled demon . . .?

Coward!
This time the jeer was my own. I seated myself, tucking in my skirts as best I could.

“I am going to push the 3 button,” Drummond said, indicating a series of numbers on the panel beneath the hand-bar. “That will take you to the baron’s workroom. It’s doubtful he’ll hear you knock, so just open the door and walk in. When you want to return, press 1. That will take you to the kitchen where you’ll find Mrs. Biddle, the housekeeper, who will show you to your room. Is that clear, Miss? To return, press 1.”

My throat had closed up, so I nodded. Inventions were
not
new to me, but the suspicion there was a more creative inventor than my father definitely was. I didn’t like it.

Drummond pressed the button. I gasped, clutched the hand-hold as if it were twenty feet to the floor instead of a twenty inches. I held my breath all the way down the long, dank corridor, expelling it only when I couldn’t hold it any longer. The incredible machine actually turned a corner, the track moving it in a wide circle near the outer walls.

At the end of this shorter corridor, a stone wall loomed. With the single rail running straight into it.

Idiot, stop shaking! It’s the same as the wall outside. A swinging door painted to look like rocks.

I gripped the hand-bar so hard my finger joints ached.
Believe, believe!

I was nearly nose to the wall when the rocky illusion gave way, two wooden doors opening soundlessly to let me though. My temper flared. What kind of diabolical welcome was this? A test, perhaps, to see if I could survive in a place that was getting more odd by the moment?

Another stone-walled corridor stretched before me. But this time, half-way down the long expanse, my vehicle slowed to a stop. Scowling, I studied the door to my right. Unadorned oak, blackened by age, and as solid as the rocks around it.

Behind it, Julian Stonegrave, Baron Rochefort, who thought this . . . this—words failed me—was the proper way to welcome his ward to Stonegrave Abbey!

I dismounted. I straightened my clothing and squared my shoulders. If I were a dragon, I’d be breathing fire.

No matter Drummond’s advice, I knocked. I was, after all, surprisingly well instructed in the niceties in spite of my haphazard upbringing. Papa had occasionally remembered that I was a girl.

No answer. Not exactly a surprise. Gingerly, I opened the door and peered inside, now well aware that Stonegrave Abbey held multiple surprises. Though thoroughly angry and unwilling to be impressed, my eyes widened.

I’d read Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
, and, believe me, this could have been his laboratory. What might once have been the Abbey’s refectory had been expanded by knocking out walls, leaving only strategic supporting columns. The floor had been dug down, leaving a cavernous space so packed with workbenches, tools, machines, and parts of machines that I had difficulty finding any sign of human occupation. Machines hummed, chugged, puffed, and groaned. Steel rods surged, high, low, overhead, moving back and forth, in and out, each in its own special rhythm. And you wouldn’t believe the jokes I’d overheard about that!

Gaslights flickered, augmented by narrow high windows on two sides of the huge space, but still I saw nothing but stone walls, wooden benches, and incomprehensible machinery.
Maybe . . .
there.
I caught a glimpse of a light brighter than the gaslights, flaring from behind a thick stone column. Descending the four shallow steps to the roughly cobbled floor, I made my way toward the light, being careful to keep my skirts tight about me so they wouldn’t be snagged as I eased my way past moving parts.

Oh. Dear. God!
I should have listened to that weak little voice that told me not to get off the train. A monster loomed before me, a giant with a cylindrical metal head, its back bent over a strip of metal. Two strips? In the maw of what looked like no glove I had ever seen before, it held a length of hose that spit out a continuous stream of red-
hot fire onto the metal strips.

I. Would. Not. Run. I would stand
my ground and figure this out.

But it wasn’t easy. The monster’s head was a good two feet tall, the only openings, two slits where eyes should be. No mouth.
Merciful heavens!

I must have made a noise that could be heard above the hiss of the flame, or else the monster finished what it was doing and looked up. Garbled sounds issued from beneath the metal. The huge gloves were tossed aside, human hands reached upward, quickly unfastening buckles on the side of the metal cylinder. What I could now see was an oversized bucket plunked down on a worktable, and I found myself gazing at a rough-about-the-edges gentleman, not a day over thirty. His dark hair was as damp and mussed as one would expect after being encased in metal and warmed by an open flame. Sweat beaded on his brow, his eyes were charcoal dark, and several days’ growth of beard stained his jaws. He wore a leather apron over what appeared to be canvas worker’s pants and a rough-woven blue shirt. One of the baron’s assistants, perhaps?

Anger. Keep the anger. Don’t let him see your fear.

I took a deep breath. “I am looking for Lord Rochefort,” I said. “Can you tell me where I might find him.”

He looked me over. So openly and so thoroughly I longed to slap his all-too-bold face. How dare he?

He smiled, his mouth crinkling up at the corners, a gleam of amusement lighting his dark eyes. “So you’re the girl who wants to fly.” He shook his head, obviously stifling a laugh. “Welcome to Stonegrave Abbey, Miss Galsworthy. Let me assure you, you’ve come to the right place.”