Nell Gwynne's On Land and At Sea (9 page)

“Especially as I suspect I’m meant to use this to go hunt sea caves full of submarine boats and floating cannons,” put in Herbertina. “I thought I would try that tonight, you know. The moon is full; there should be plenty of light.”

“You should rest, then,” said Miss Rendlesham, closing her book and standing up. “And certainly change your clothes! Your trouser cuffs are destroyed, and you will surely want rougher clothes for tonight.”

The drayman having departed with the box in which the dandy horse had come, they stashed it in the stables with their own trunks and covered it with a horse blanket. Miss Rendlesham carefully affixed the label from Mrs. Corvey’s own trunk to the blanketed lump, which they adjudged should render it invisible to any of the staff until it was time to depart for home.

Mrs. Goodman had departed when they all trooped back upstairs, but she had left behind a box of further surprises for everyone else. Mrs. Corvey, in a rare expansive mood, passed out some odd-looking items: what were surely busks and corset stays, but made of a smooth black fibrous material.

“And these are also from Mr. Felmouth,” she said, “for the rest of us. He must be sending us everything loose in the Fabrication Department! He writes to say he is not sure what use these may be, but he also advises that they are much lighter than ordinary stays and even stronger. An experimental effort at making artificial whalebone, I gather.”

“Lighter stays are always a grand idea. And stronger ones, too; work does get rather vigorous at times…” said Miss Rendlesham. She rubbed a cautious finger along a busk, but the color remained fast. “What are they made of?”

“He claims they are made from a fiber somehow spun from pitch, and reinforced with glue,” said Mrs. Corvey. “And as daft as
that
sounds, there’s more: he says that if these are used in place of ordinary stays, they should prove proof against both knives and small arms fire!”

“Then they ought to be marvelous against badly aimed champagne corks, said Jane. “Which I do most sincerely hope will continue to be the worst thing we encounter.”

“Well, I’ll try them out tonight,” said Herbertina gamely. “If they can stand up against the rigors of the dandy horse, they should be proof against playful MPs, don’t you think?”

Lady Beatrice, having already fetched her second-best corset, looked up from where she was carefully unpicking a pertinent seam.

“I imagine tonight may well tell,” she said gravely, and set her own corset aside. “To which end, Herbertina, do bring me one of your special corsets and I will make the changes for you before you go out this evening.”

She looked at Mrs. Corvey, and added, “Along with his usual daily flowers, Mr. Pickett has invited us to a picnic supper this evening. I have accepted, so as to make sure that he, at least, is distracted. And should it require serious measures to keep him from the cliff tops, it would be better if there were nothing peculiar for him to find out about
my
corset. The man is an engineer, after all.”

“If he can think about engineering after getting down to your corset, he’s a match for us,” said Herbertina gallantly. “Wear that one with the dozens of little bows, and he’ll spend hours as busy as a kitten with a ball of yarn!”

As the afternoon went on, Lady Beatrice methodically replaced stays in one of Herbertina’s custom corset (plain white duck, in the masculine style favored by gentlemen of youthful aspirations but spreading waistlines).

Mrs. Otley, having rejoined them all in the parlor, reported excitedly on Mr. Darwin’s agreement with her that the Kents Cavern skull was quite peculiar. She was preparing another letter regarding the vertebrae she had also found. Miss Rendlesham made a few rather perfunctory remarks about the general dreadfulness of the project, but finally allowed that a quasi-human fossil was indeed more interesting than yet another sea monster; of which, she commented, they seemed to have a sufficiency.

The Devere sisters promised all and sundry that they would utilize Mr. Felmouth’s gifts at the very earliest opportunity; they then promptly went off to the beach for a splash, accompanied by the patient Herbertina as escort.

“It’s like running a nursery sometimes with that lot. Or keeping kittens,” Mrs. Corvey said as they went chattering out. “But there—they’re good girls in a pinch and do liven the place up. You just have to keep them from getting bored.”

“I cannot imagine the Devere sisters bored,” said Lady Beatrice dryly.

In such pleasant ordinary pastimes the hours went by. If one were unaware that Lady Beatrice was replacing corset stays with an eye to enhancing the armour capabilities of her fellow whore, or that Mrs. Otley was lecturing Miss Rendlesham about the possible discovery of a prediluvian sub-human, it would have seemed the very ideal of a domestic scene. When Mrs. Corvey decreed that tea would be taken downstairs with their fellow lodgers (in part to forestall questions from anyone who might have observed the dandy horse exercises), the fossils and armour stays were laid aside and they went down discussing the replacement of Miss Rendlesham’s ill-fated seaside bonnet.

The bathers returned as tea was finishing up, and the family adjourned
en masse
upstairs once more, with Master Herbert teasingly speculating on the horrible crop of freckles his sisters were sure to have incurred in their afternoon excursion. Their progress was loudly hilarious all the way up the stairs, to the amusement of the other lodgers below.

“Right then,” said Mrs. Corvey briskly as the door closed behind them and the cover conversation was abandoned. “Herbertina, you go have a lie down before this evening. The moon doesn’t rise until quarter past nine or so, and you should be as rested as possible before you try that thing on the cliff path.”

Herbertina saluted smartly and went off to the room she shared with the Deveres. The sisters busied themselves assembling a scratch meal of sandwiches and lemonade for themselves, and made up a packet for Herbertina to take with her on her next foray.

“That gandy horse needs a basket or saddlebags or something,” commented Jane.

“
Dandy
, not gandy,” corrected Maude. “It would be useful to secure a light to it somehow, too, for night use.”

“Not tonight,” said Mrs. Corvey. “Tonight, we want Herbertina to be as invisible as possible, and that full moon will light up her as well as the cottages. When you’ve finished that package, girls, see to it that she’s got clothes laid out that ain’t too bright
or
dark. Greys and browns, like; maybe that lavender coat of hers—it’ll fade out nicely and slide by the eye in moonlight.”

“People mostly see what they expect to see, after all,” observed Lady Beatrice. She held up the finished corset, now securely lined with Mr. Felmouth’s strange stays. “And no one will expect to see Herbertina up there tonight, which will help. If she dresses darkly and keeps to the shadows, she should be able to see and yet not be seen.”

“We shall see. Or not. And that,” said Mrs. Corvey, “is the point, ain’t it?”

The lamps were lit in the parlor eventually. Beyond the front windows, the eastern sky over the Channel was showing the barest hint of a glow where the moon would rise soon. There was no fog off the bay tonight, only the deep blue summer twilight.

Lady Beatrice and Mrs. Corvey had left in Mr. Pickett’s carriage an hour before, when there was still a bright sky and gold on the sea. Now Miss Rendlesham was setting up the Aetheric Transmitter, just in case one of their enterprises abroad in the night should call in. Both Herbertina and Lady Beatrice carried small devices that resembled pill boxes—called sparkers, when operated they emitted bursts of Aetheric energy that could be detected on the receiver as a series of pops and squeaks. There were a number of pre-arranged codes that all the Ladies had committed to memory, and the new American Morse Code more than sufficed for longer messages.

“I don’t know if I hope you see something or not,” said Mrs. Otley. “It all sounds so dangerous, and we are supposed to be on holiday!”

Herbertina was up and dressed, in more subdued colors than was her wont. She looked up from winding a spare scarf about one trouser leg, puttee-style, to prevent its being frayed by the dandy horse’s treadles.

“Well, Erato, unexpected things are supposed to happen on holiday, aren’t they?” she said cheerfully. “You discovered your funny skull, Charlotte was attacked by a seagull, and Mrs. C. has found a sea monster. Or a pirate. And I’ll nail which it is tonight! Then we can all go back to hunting sea shells and wondering if there’ll be lemon curd for tea.”

So saying, she tipped her cloth cap at the room in general, and sauntered out the door. The Devere sisters went quietly out to the balcony to watch her progress to the stable and out of the dark courtyard. Though the Ladies still in the rooms listened intently, there was almost no noise from down below—a creak from the stable doors, a whirring noise, and then a soft metallic drone that must have been the iron tires on the cobbles.

“She was a bit wobbly on the corner,” reported Dora, coming in. “But she straightened right up and went off down the street at a great speed! It looks like tremendous fun.”

“More importantly, it looks like it will work. It’s silent and nearly invisible in the dark,” added Jane.

The sisters settled down to work on their corsets. Miss Rendlesham read aloud from the final chapter of
Dombey and Son,
while they all sat waiting for the Aetheric Transmitter to make some revelatory sound.

In the same silken blue twilight, Lady Beatrice and Mr. Pickett strolled along the cliff tops that fronted his rented villa.

They had picnicked pleasantly enough in the lee of his garden walls, Mrs. Corvey having pled an aversion to the sea wind on her face as she ate. However, as there was patently no wind at all this evening, that served to keep Mr. Pickett from the cliffs only for a brief duration; indeed, his eagerness to venture there alone with Lady Beatrice was so obvious as to be barely decent. When Mrs. Corvey had finally announced she would retire for a post-prandial rest, Mr. Pickett had helped her indoors with such alacrity her feet barely seemed to touch the ground.

He then rejoined Lady Beatrice. She noted with some amusement that he apparently would not have cared had he known that Mrs. Corvey was settling in to pillage his desk and suborn his cook, so anxious was he to get Beatrice to himself.

She was resigned to a certain athleticism in the course of the coming evening, which she felt sure would distract Mr. Pickett even if the growing moonlight were to reveal Herbertina actively scuttling whatever craft was hidden in the sea caves.

The path was meandering, but neatly cut into the soil and covered with a fine gravel that reflected the last light with soft clarity. Lady Beatrice, noting that the edges were sharp and clean, looked a little more closely and saw that it still retained parallel wheel marks: something quite heavy had been wheeled back and forth on this little pathway, something wider than a wheelbarrow but much narrower than any carriage or pony-cart. She doubted the tidy work on the path was attributable to the estate agents from whom Mr. Pickett had leased the house.

When the upper windows of the house were obscured by a turn round a rise of land, Lady Beatrice sighed and leaned subtly toward Mr. Pickett as they walked. Reflexively—as she expected—his arm rose and encircled her waist. The quickening pulses in his chest and fingers were just discernible through the satin of her bodice. She lay her hand on his where it rested against her side, and matched his stride with a little skip neatly obscured by her skirts; so that they settled, by her artifice, into an effortless and perfectly rhythmic pace together.

Lady Beatrice judged that Mr. Pickett was by now quite thoroughly distracted. She was therefore unsurprised when he suddenly stopped, and turned her firmly in his arms to face him.

“Miss Beatrice—lovely Beatrice, if I may be so bold—I must unburden myself to you,” he said hoarsely. “I would not risk your good opinion or your safety for all the world—I’m sure you know that—but…my darling Beatrice, may I tell you a great secret?”

Lady Beatrice had become accustomed to feigning enthusiasm at all manner of requests—but at this fevered query, she smiled up at Mr. Pickett in genuine delight. To judge by his dilating pupils, the effect was devastating.

“Dearest Tredway,” she murmured, gazing up with sincere pleasure lighting her grey eyes, “you may tell me
anything.”

Mrs. Corvey had made herself as comfortable as possible in Mr. Pickett’s austere sitting room. She had a brief but profitable rifle through his desk—still unlocked; the man had utterly unwarranted trust in the servants he treated so cavalierly—and even went so far as to slip a few receipts into her reticule. There were alarming numbers of them from his foundry connections, which provided potentially useful tidbits such as names, locations and quantities of work. It appeared his project was approaching completion.

There were also several pages of good stationery, filled with much-crossed-out and amended declarations of his love for Lady Beatrice. Mrs. Corvey was amused to see he was evidently on the verge of proposing marriage, but was having trouble working up either his nerve or the appropriate wording. She wouldn’t have thought the brash and self-aggrandizing Mr. Pickett was so shy…on the other hand, maybe he was struggling to find a way to phrase his plans for international piracy in a manner that would please a mother-in-law.

Considering the image of Pickett in his scarlet highwayman’s coat, down on one knee to ask her for Lady Beatrice’s hand, diverted Mrs. Corvey considerably as she composed herself once more on the settee. She rang for the parlor maid, and requested that Mrs. Drumm please attend her with some of her excellent pastries and a fresh pot of tea.

Footsteps sounded outside the parlor door in a gratifyingly brief time. Mrs. Corvey considered that Mrs. Drumm must have been keeping an eye out for her master’s guests and been prepared; which evidence of professional skill was very heartening. She was also pleased to see that the cook arrived alone with the refreshments, and entered with a nice little cough to announce herself to the “blind” Mrs. Corvey.

“Oh, Mrs. Drumm, is it you?” inquired Mrs. Corvey unnecessarily.

“Indeed, madam, as you requested.” Mrs. Drumm set down the tray, which was properly set with only a single teacup. From the pocket of her apron, though, she drew a second teacup which had been discreetly stashed so that the intimate nature of their meeting was not blatantly advertised. She pulled up a chair and then poured for them both, plated a nice pair of lemon tarts, and leaned forward to guide one plate and fork into Mrs. Corvey’s hands.