Hounds of Autumn (2 page)

Chapter 2

T
he town of Farnbridge was
on the eastern end of Dartmoor, and was large enough to boast both a railway and an airship station. Ambrose had relatives in Farnbridge, wealthy ones, as his sister Rose had married into the Aynesworth family. Unfortunately, Rose had passed away fifteen years ago and Ambrose had not seen his niece and three nephews since.

Rose’s widower and the head of the Aynesworth family, William, had sent one of the family horse-drawn carriages to fetch them. The driver, a burly young man, introduced himself as Mr. James. He and Mr. Frick lifted their bags and two trunks onto the carriage. The trunks contained clothing and personal effects. But Chloe was far more concerned with Ambrose’s research materials and her laboratory gear. Both would be arriving by rail the following day.

The carriage pulled out of the airship station and started through town.

“There’s the mechanical shop, mum,” said Miss Haynes from her seat across from Ambrose and Chloe. Mr. Frick took a glance and returned to gazing sullenly out his own window.

“Perfect,” said Chloe. “I’ll have to stop in.”

As the airship station was on the opposite side of town from the road they needed to take, they got a good look at the town of Farnbridge. There was a dress shop, hat shop, police station, butcher, grocer, and various inns and boarding houses. Traps, carriages and hansom cabs clattered past while women with parasols and men in top hats strolled along the main avenue.

“It has changed since last I was here,” said Ambrose. “More people. Money from the tin mines and manufactories, I suppose.” The carriage left behind the last of the buildings, crossed a small stone bridge and continued down a road and out through the countryside.

“Why didn’t one of the family come to fetch us?” asked Chloe. It seemed a tad unseemly to fail to greet visiting relatives.

“No idea,” said Ambrose, distracted. “The Aynesworths were always a little odd. But they are wealthy, so no one minds it too much.”

As he spoke, he studied the landscape intently. Their visit to Aynesworth House was not merely a social call, but was in large part designed to advance Ambrose’s research on Dartmoor flora. A naturalist by profession, and a scientist at heart, Ambrose was mentally categorizing each plant, stream, and moss-covered rock they passed. Chloe had watched as he spent months reading up on the area, and had filled reams of paper with his notes.

His latest book, which he hoped to complete by the end of the year, was on the insect-eating plants of the moor. He theorized that the carnivorous plants like the many-spined Sundew and the harmless-looking Genlisea actually derived nutrients from the insects they lured in and consumed, contrary to the prevailing idea that trapping insects was a defensive mechanism. Ambrose pulled out a small pad of paper and a pencil from his coat pocket and made a note from time to time.

Chloe was mildly interested in such things. But for her part, the distant in-laws and insect-eating plants were distractions. She had come to call upon Mrs. Camille Granger, one of the very few other female inventors and mechanical specialists in all of the British Empire. Mrs. Granger’s experimental work on cadmium and nickel batteries to store energy was a breakthrough, a revelation. Chloe’s hands had trembled when she read a paper about it, and upon completing it, she had flipped to the front. The name of the author, C. Granger, was printed beneath the title. She had drafted a letter to C. Granger that very afternoon.

With the potential to store electricity in that manner, powering new types of mechanicals became possible. Without such storage devices, only the two current types of mechanicals could exist. Smaller mechanicals were clockwork, and had a winding mechanism of one kind or another. The larger mechanicals, which existed for household or industrial use, were steam powered. They burned coal or wood to create heat and thus power their mechanisms. They worked well enough, but the possibilities of electricity made the gears in Chloe’s imagination spin.

After reading the paper and forming a correspondence with Camille Granger, she had spent the next three years creating Giles. To her knowledge, he was one of only two electrical mechanicals in the world. The other belonged to Camille Granger.

They approached a crossroads and the carriage slowed. Up ahead were two police horses. They were nibbling on plants while a small group of people gathered around what looked from this distance to be a bog.

Small clumps of greenery grew around its edges, and the surface of the bog, covered in a blanket of moss a few inches thick, was smooth. Four dogs of varying sizes and colors jumped and barked and a local farmer was doing his best to quiet them. Two constables in navy serge uniforms stood side by side, one talking and gesturing while the other wrote in his notebook. Near their feet was a prostrate form, muddy and still.

The carriage stopped as it reached the police horses and their driver called out. An officer looked up and waved.

Miss Haynes craned her neck to see out the window, and even Mr. Frick looked interested. One of the officers walked toward the carriage and spoke to their driver.

“Hey there, Mr. James! Can you get past the horses all right?”

“I expect so. But what happened? Who is that?”

Three words had Chloe up from her seat and out the carriage door in a single motion: “Camille Granger” and “murder.”

Ambrose leapt out after her and grabbed her hand.

“It’s her. It’s Camille!” cried Chloe, one hand in Ambrose’s and the other gripping the skirts of her traveling dress. “I have to go.”

“Come, Chloe, you don’t need to see this.”

“But it’s her. She was my—I know we never met in person—but she was my friend.”

The officer and Mr. James were still talking. Mr. Frick and Miss Haynes were now out of the carriage as well, and Miss Haynes put her hand on Chloe’s arm.

Ambrose relaxed his grip and Chloe yanked free and rushed down the small rise and toward the bog. Her shoes were not designed for hiking and the ground was soft, like a wet sponge, but she did not pause. Her eyes were fixed on the form lying on the ground. She stopped short before she got too close to the body, paused for a moment and forced herself to move closer.

Camille Granger’s heavy skirts were blackened with mud. The top of her body was encased in a heavy dark jacket, which was buttoned up to her throat. The white skin on her face and hands was streaked with bog slime and her hair, which looked like it had once been blonde, was a dark matted mass pressed close against her head. Her blue eyes, open and staring at the sky, were dull and flecked with mud.

She was gone, and her body was just a lifeless object, lying on the cold earth. Her friend, her colleague, was dead. Chloe blinked involuntarily, as if her own eyes were also gritty with dirt.

The officer who had stayed by the body, a stout, short man with thick wet lips, stepped in front of her. “This is no sight for a lady,” he said, looking to Ambrose, who was still approaching, to perform his husbandly duty and remove her from the scene. Chloe was sickened, and her heart was beating fast in her chest. She took a final look at Camille Granger and turned aside. Perhaps the men were right. Despite the cold, she had broken into a sweat and she felt light-headed. She did not consider herself a woman of delicate sensibilities, but in this case, she had to agree that this was no sight for a woman.

Ambrose took Chloe’s elbow and gently turned her away. She did not resist. The four barking dogs had mostly quieted, and their master made eye contact with Chloe. The man was short and wiry, his skin wrinkled and toughened by a life outdoors.

“Excuse me, but did you find her?” Chloe asked.

“Ah, no. My dogs did. They got out and I found them here, barking something terrible. Then I found poor Mrs. Granger.”

“You knew her?”

“Oh yes. She’s Charles Granger’s wife. Lives over that way.” He kept hold of two of the wilder dogs and nodded his head in the direction in which the Aynesworth family lived. She had known that the Granger and Aynesworth households were in the same area, but not that they were neighbors. “I’m glad I don’t have to tell her husband she’s been killed.”

“Why is that?” said Chloe, her stomach tightening.

The man shrugged and looked away.

“Did she fall into the bog?”

“I don’t think so,” he said, and whistled for one of the dogs that had wandered too far afield. “When I came by, only her arm had come out of the bog. The police pulled her the rest of the way out from under the moss. It looks like the back of her head has been bashed in by something.” He stopped, becoming aware that this revelation might upset a lady of gentle birth. He wiped nervously at his face with a grubby sleeve and turned away to tend his dogs.

They took a few steps and Chloe felt Ambrose pause as he studied the ground.

“What’s that then?” she asked, leaning forward with him to look at the strange prints on the ground. They looked like animal prints, but were thin and spidery with four front prongs and a center pad that was a perfect oval.

“What strange tracks,” said Ambrose.

Both constables approached, eyeing the ground. Ambrose showed them the tracks and the officers exchanged a dark look. “The hound,” one of them said to the other as Ambrose led Chloe back to the carriage.

From this direction, facing away from the bog, Chloe could see a small bank of rocks close to the crossroads. It was like a half-cairn, built into the side of the hill, about waist-high and twice as wide. Dark holes gaped around the stones, the perfect dwelling places for mice or snakes. Something about it drew her eye.

Miss Haynes, Mr. James and Mr. Frick were waiting. Mr. Frick held his crisp gray bowler over his chest in respect for the deceased. Miss Haynes’s eyes were downcast, her arms folded loosely across her midsection.

Ambrose was frowning, and Chloe could not bear to put him out further. She followed him to the carriage. Wordlessly, Ambrose handed Chloe inside and Mr. James drove gently around the police horses and in the direction of Aynesworth House.

Ambrose tried to distract her, pointing out a tor sitting atop a hill in the distance, its giant stones eerily stacked upon one another as if an enormous child was playing with his blocks. The moor was littered with such natural formations, as well as ancient man-made stone circles and the remains of a number of equally ancient circular stone huts. They passed hills covered in bracken fern and chunks of granite, varying in size from small boulders to great stones the size of an airship engine.

“I can’t imagine that Camille would have any enemies,” said Chloe. “Do you think it was because of her research? Perhaps there was a competitor who wanted to patent a similar design.”

Miss Haynes’s head jerked up. She was not only Chloe’s lady’s maid, but was regularly drafted into assisting with experiments and prototypes. She was both intelligent, patient and could manage to dress Chloe’s unruly copper penny hair, all of which made her an ideal employee.

When Ambrose didn’t answer, Miss Haynes said softly, “Perhaps someone would have been threatened by her work and killed her to get rid of potential competition. One of the coal companies perhaps?”

“I doubt it,” said Mr. Frick. “They were just early designs, right, mum?” He looked at Chloe who nodded. “No need to commit murder for that.” He settled back into staring glumly out the window.

Ambrose reached into Chloe’s satchel, pulling out Giles and turning him over to find his power switch.

“No, leave him for now,” she said, though she did take the still form and place it in her lap. She stroked his patchwork cloth cover and thought of the sheaf of papers in her satchel. Along with various notes and diagrams were a few of the many letters she and Camille had exchanged.

After Chloe had discovered Mrs. Granger’s academic paper on cadmium and nickel batteries, she had written to Cambridge University, the publisher of the paper, with a request to forward her letter to the author. She had signed the letter C. Sullivan and waited.

A few months later, the two inventors had developed a regular correspondence. After a few weeks of silence from C. Granger, Chloe had received a short letter from Mr. C. Granger stating that it was “not seemly” for a married woman to have a male correspondent. Chloe was bewildered at first, as the handwriting of this C. Granger was more stiff and angular than the soft, flowing script of her friend. In moments, her confusion turned to delight when she realized that her C. Granger was a woman.

She had immediately jotted off a note to Mr. and Mrs. Charles Granger, explaining her gender and her hope of reinstating their regular correspondence. After two weeks, another letter, this one in Mrs. Camille Granger’s handwriting, arrived, including sketches for one of her prototypes.

And then, a month ago, one of Camille’s letters ended with a troubling paragraph.

“Do not respond to this part of my letter, as my husband reads my correspondence. I feel, now that I will meet you in a few weeks, I can confide that our regular communications have made my existence bearable. Though confined most of the time, I feel my mind and heart could fly free, even if for a short while. I am looking forward to finally meeting you in person and collaborating with you on some new designs.”

Chloe had wondered at the time if Camille’s “confinement” was because she was with child. She had not mentioned it in any other letters, and surely something of that magnitude would have warranted at least a line. The only conclusion she could draw was that Mr. Charles Granger kept his wife under close watch. How then could she have ended up on the moor alone?

It was a miracle that Camille’s body had been found at all in the thousands of miles of bogs and marshes. As they passed tors and hills, Chloe was grateful for Ambrose’s warm shape by her side. She was not given to flights of fancy, but as the sun moved behind the gray clouds, she understood how people could imagine seeing a phantom hound in this vast terrain. The shadows thrown by the boulders and tors certainly inspired thoughts of ghosts and spirits and she had heard that at night, the mist could become so thick as to make it impossible to see a person standing directly in front of you.

Ambrose muttered something and scratched with his pencil in his notebook.

“Pardon?”