Gilded Lily (21 page)

“What
happened
?”

“I attempted to rescue a kitten from a tree. It was the wrong kitten, and very much the wrong tree.”

“You could have just told me it was none of my business.” Barnabas flipped the bedclothes away from his legs, then flipped them back when he realized he was naked. He wasn't sure how he was ever going to face the butler again. “Where did you get the clean clothes?”

“Mrs. Wallingford procured them.”

His brother lifted a pile of garments from the chair in the corner, tossing them to Barnabas and taking a seat while he dressed.

“Not her husband's?” Barnabas couldn't resist, especially as Phineas kept pointedly emphasizing the lady's marital status rather than her rank.

“Neither of you mentioned she was a widow.”

“We hardly had time. Honestly it didn't occur to me until later. Would it have made a difference?”

Phineas scowled, gesturing down at himself, then waving a hand at his damaged face. “Probably not. You're a terrible spy, you know. I thought I ought to mention it, in case you planned to continue in this career past this one assignment. Assuming Murcheson doesn't have you hanged at some point in the near future, because you've made such a botch of this first job already. Watching his daughter. I just know he jokes about that assignment. It's a scut detail.”

It was a fair point, one that Barnabas had made to himself already. But Phineas was his
younger
brother and that sort of talk couldn't be allowed to go unanswered. “Says the one-eyed former spy who fled the country in the middle of his own undercover job, apparently in a fit of pique because the girl he fancied had married somebody else. And is that supposed to be a pirate costume, Phin? An airship pirate? How can we possibly tell? You're still short one wooden suction-leg and a grapnel hand, not to mention the parrot. Somebody might not understand that you were a pirate, without those additional cues. The eye patch, unkempt hair and surly disposition simply aren't definitive enough. Though the striped shirt you had on the other day was a superb defining touch. You might consider knocking out a tooth or two.”

“Bastard.”

“Don't disparage our parents like that.” Barnabas knotted his tie before shrugging into the jacket Phineas had thrown his way. The clothes fit surprisingly well, though they were plain. Sophie apparently had a good idea of men's sizing. “Perhaps we can get something to eat before we go to find the squid. Wait, why are you here at all? I thought you were going to Mersea to retrieve the
Gilded Lily
. Did I dream that conversation?”

Chuckling, Phineas stood and headed for the door. “Last night I went for a walk and discovered that Lady Sophronia had a very nice single-chair dirigible in her carriage house. Not to mention a comfortable steam car. I borrowed them for a little while, took the steam car to the place I planned to dock the
Gilded Lily
, then flew to get it and took it to its new dock. Deflated the airship and drove the steam car back here, after making a few stops for supplies. I returned a few hours ago and had a short rest until I got bored waiting for you to wake up on your own. Really, the trip was ridiculously easy compared to when we made it.”

“It all depends on who you're borrowing from, it seems. I must say you've had an admirable night and morning, doing all that while I was sleeping like the dead. You must have the constitution of an ox. What stops did you have to make?” He stepped into his shoes and bent to tie them before following Phineas. They were the ones he'd had on the previous day, unfortunately, and were still damp with a disreputable air about them. Somebody had at least attempted to clean them and restore their polish, however. Sophie really did have a top-notch staff.

“Villesandro's Fine Voltaics, of course. For zinc and potassium chlorate. Where else would you find them?”

Squishing down the hall, Barnabas shrugged. “Of course. Naturally.”

“Then a printer's, for the manganese dioxide. I had to ask around a bit to find a fellow who specialized in colored plates. Hope I have enough of the stuff. Of course the real problem will be keeping the potassium stable until we can get it to the submersible. Where it may or may not blow us to kingdom come when we actually attempt to use it.”

“Did you memorize the sub's manual?”

“I could have, but I didn't have to,” Phineas said, as they tramped down the stairs side by side. “I wrote most of it.”

D
ANIEL
P
INKERTON STOOD
in the hall near the foot of the stairs, bearing an envelope. He appeared to be there in his official capacity, as he was wearing livery, and he studiously avoided Barnabas's eye as he passed him the missive with a perfunctory bow. All formality.

“M'lord.”

“Good morning, Daniel.”

Two of Sophie's servants were at work nearby, one visible through the front parlor door, dusting, and another busy cleaning the large mirror down the hall. Although her people had demonstrated remarkable discretion thus far, Barnabas had no idea how far her trust extended. He kept his voice low as he addressed Daniel, while he pulled the envelope open and withdrew the contents.

“I take it you delivered Miss Murcheson safely last night. My thanks again.”

“I did, sir.”

“Regardless of what you must think, my intentions toward her are—” He stopped for a moment, unsure what his intentions in fact were. Whatever he might want, things were muddled by the things Freddie didn't seem to want. He wasn't sure where that left him. “They're not dishonorable.”

“Yes, sir. Begging your pardon, but I was told I needn't wait for a response. I must return to my duties. M'lord. Sir.”

He gave them each a nod and was out the front door before Barnabas could think of what to say.

“Cheeky,” Phineas remarked.

“Not usually. He's a good lad, but he's under the impression I've sullied Miss Murcheson, and he's not happy about it.”

“I was laboring under that same impress—”

“I'm going to marry her,” he said abruptly, glaring at Phineas, daring him silently to say another word. He had no idea where it had come from, that declaration. But it felt true, and by God he would knock his brother to the ground if he kept going on like that.

“Duly noted. And probably for the best. Why don't you read your letter? It seems to have come from the young woman in question.”

It had. And it was baffling.

Dear Lord Smith-Grenville,

He had to read that a few times, confused by the formal address. Too late for that now, surely. Was somebody reading over her shoulder when she wrote it?

Dear Lord Smith-Grenville,

After my arrival home last night, I received word of your unfortunate circumstance. I hope you will accept my sincere well-wishes for your recovery in light of what I must now convey. My father has learned of our adventures in the tunnel below the channel. He has convinced me of the extreme dangers of this enterprise and the luck we had in escaping unscathed. He has explained the severity of my crimes—and yours—and I now understand how wrong I was to undertake such activities and encourage you to stray so far from your own duties. I have agreed to limit my excursions in future to those venues most appropriate for a young, unmarried woman. To aid in this, I shall soon be moving to the country.

Father has indicated your employment will be ending as I will no longer be in need of your supervision. I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors.

Please also relay to Lady Sophronia that I must decline her kind invitation to luncheon, as I am suffering a headache.

She'd ended with “Sincerely, Frédérique Murcheson.” If there was one thing this letter lacked, it was sincerity, of that much Barnabas was sure.

“This is some sort of code. Or he forced her to write it.
Something.
It makes no sense,” he insisted to Phineas after reading the letter aloud. “I have to go see her.”

“Shouldn't you be planning to flee the country? Look, you have a narrow window of opportunity here. Murcheson apparently believes Sophie's excuse about your ankle, that's all well and good, but he's going to do a great deal more than just dismiss you from his Agency if he knows you were down in that tunnel with Freddie. At the very least he must assume you've been a horribly incompetent employee to let her get that far. And it sounds as though your Freddie's had a fairly extreme change of heart. From the tone of that note, it's only a matter of time before she tells him the rest, and he learns you were actively assisting her. Working very much against his direct orders.”

“She would never—”

“And if she tells him
all
the rest you won't be safe in Europa or the Dominions either. South America might give you a fighting chance. It
might
. But not if you dither away your lead time.”

“What do you mean,
all
the rest?”

“I'm certain we both know what I mean, Barnabas. Are you really going to make me say it aloud?” Phineas raised his eyebrows expectantly.

The inn. The night they'd spent together. “No. Of course not.”

“Perhaps this letter is code, although I can't think for what. Or perhaps, and this seems more likely to me, a young girl got into trouble far over her head and, when confronted by the primary authority figure in her life, realized what a dismal fool she'd been. Realized the risks she'd taken by exploring things she shouldn't. And of course Murcheson wouldn't have told her if he was sending people to arrest you. Whether or not that letter is genuine, you have to get out of here before they show up.”

He'd known Phineas all his life, and only known Freddie a short time. Should he weigh his own irrational hope against the opinion of his brother, whom he trusted, and who after all was only taking the letter at face value?

He read the letter again, trying to see it objectively. Phineas's version of things did make more sense, didn't it? From the stories Freddie had told him, her father's approval meant more to her than she would ever admit directly. Even in her effort to escape Murcheson's control, she had sought to prove herself to him. And she'd never spoken to Barnabas of the future, of a life they might share together, had she? Far from it.

They were still at the foot of the stairs. Barnabas gripped the ornate wooden finial on the post for support, trying to steady himself against the crushing fear that his brother was absolutely correct.

“She said—no, it can't be that.”

“Can't be what?”

He swallowed, forcing back a painful lump of some emotion he couldn't bring himself to name. “She said I was
convenient
. And beautiful. But—”

“She called you beautiful? She's such an odd girl.”

“I think . . . I think she
used
me.”

Phineas's silence was deafening. Meanwhile Barnabas's mind kept offering images of Freddie, each smile, every dimple, but seen now through quite a different lens. Friendly and eager, because that had been the best way to seduce him. Honest to a fault, because she'd seen it was getting her everything she wanted. What would be the point in lying? She'd told him what he was to her, and he hadn't listened. He'd heard what he wanted to. Not surprising, as evidently he'd been listening with his cock, not his heart as he'd convinced himself.

He'd come all this way, he thought he might have found some sort of strange, stolen happiness at last, and instead he'd been slapped in the face with his own inadequacies. By a girl in trousers.

A beautiful, convenient girl in trousers, who'd sown him like a wild oat.

“Is this what it felt like?” he asked his brother. “Is this why you had to leave everything?”

“No. That part comes later, when you see her married to another man.”

It cut him deeply enough now, just thinking about it. Actually witnessing that would be too deep a wound to survive. But he owed Freddie Murcheson one thing, at least. His brother, back by his side. If nothing else good came of this wretched trip to England, he had still managed to salvage Phineas from the wreckage.

“What are you going to do now?” he asked him. “Go to the Admiral? Or to Murcheson?”

“The
Gilded Lily
is still waiting,” Phineas reminded him. “It's fast and maneuverable, more so than you've seen. Miss Murcheson didn't know all its capabilities. I'm going to take it and do what I can to disperse the cephalopods before Furneval and his subs can get to them. At least it will forestall the slaughter until I can think of something better, and perhaps the distraction will buy enough time to allow the station crew to repair the Glass Octopus. I'll start at the coordinates where we found the squid shoal before, then use signal lanterns to try to draw them away. I don't know if it will work, and I suspect there's a fair chance one of the creatures will catch me and put an end to me. And you're off to South America, so I suppose this is good-bye.”

He'd lost Freddie, or rather learned that he'd never had her to begin with. He'd lost his job, or would as soon as Murcheson caught up with him. Barnabas wasn't ready to lose a brother today on top of all that.

“It's not good-bye. I'm coming with you.”

 • • • 

M
ORDECAI HAD BEEN BUSY.

Sometimes, Rollo was pleased with the things his friend accomplished when he grew busy. But many times, and Rollo feared this was one of those, nothing good came of it.

He had squinted down through the sluggish, slopping brine at the queer assemblage of poles and mesh attached to the side of the small submersible as it departed the concealed warehouse dock, and thought,
This will end badly, I just know it
.

“You promised,” Mord had reminded him when he showed him the contraption, because for all his eccentricities the little man knew Rollo very well. He knew that Rollo sometimes needed reminding of his promises. He knew Rollo was capable of breaking promises too. But not the ones he made to Mord, never those. Not yet, anyway.

“I did.”

“This one's fast and little. We take it out, three of us, and when we find the baby cuttlefish we come alongside and just scoop it in!”

“Scoop it in?” The cage contraption was a cube about the height of a man on each side. Having seen the squid things move, Rollo was skeptical that the submersible could get close enough to scoop one into a trap that small, but he wasn't about to express that skepticism to Mord.

“Just
scoop
it right in,” Mord had repeated, attempting to illustrate the method with his arms. “Scoop. Like that. Then the cuttlefish gets swept along, see, and it can't escape because it can't swim faster than the sub.”

“At some point the submersible must stop. What then?”

“By then the baby's tired out. We drive the sub back here, some divers hop into the water to rotate the cage, tie a net on top for a cover, and Bob's your uncle.”

“And if all goes according to plan, we then have a baby cuttlefish in our submersible dock?”

“I'm designing a tank for it. A
tank
. Such a tank, you wait and see.”

Rollo feared he knew already. He recognized the light of lunatic genius in Mord's eyes. Such a tank would be large and costly, and must be left behind if ever they had to abandon this place in a hurry. Leaving the authorities to wonder, no doubt, about the mental stability of one Rollo Furneval. Because who kept a giant blinking squid in an opium warehouse? But then somebody would realize the tank's cobbled-together pump solved some heretofore unsolvable problem of hydraulic engineering, or find that the glass was of a structure never seen before, because Mordecai did things like that. Rollo had tried to get him to do it on command, but that wasn't how his friend operated, and he'd learned over the years that serendipity was all he could hope for. He kept his promises, he kept Mord happy and occupied, and occasionally it resulted in something spectacular. Even more rarely, it turned out to be wildly profitable, which was what really mattered to Rollo.

This didn't feel like wild profit in the making, but he'd let it play out and see what happened. Perhaps the squid would turn out to be a source of an ink nobody had ever seen before, or be filled with a rare chemical he could claim exclusive rights to. Or there might turn out to be a lucrative market for enormous cuttlebones.

The spotter had spied the inbound sub only two hours or so after it had left the dock. Relieved, Rollo waited by the secret dock, along with the two unhappy gentlemen he'd selected as divers. Young, fit, with sound lungs, but infinitely replaceable, both of them. They shivered in their combinations as the sub approached, though it was a fine day. When the cage rig scraped along the edge of the docking bay, Rollo looked into it and had to laugh.

“I think you'll be safe enough,” he told the lads with a snort.

The bolder of the two leaned over to have a look, and chuckled in relief. “That's all?”

The cuttlefish was a baby indeed, and what was more, Rollo suspected it hadn't survived its capture and subsequent journey. It clung like a scrap of colorless rag to the roof of the cage, the part that would be on one side once the boys twisted it about. They jumped into the water fearlessly once the sub's engine had stopped and the propellers were still, and had just begun to grapple with the cage when the vessel's hatch opened. Mord popped out, hair in every direction, eyes so wide the white showed below his irises.