Brilliant Devices (23 page)

Movement caught his eye—not the movement of bird or beast, but a flash
of gold.

“Look!” He pointed out the viewing port, which was made of isinglass. “Is that their landau?”

“Sure enough.” The man on the lever made some adjustments, and a great billow of steam issued from the stack, like a signal. “That should let them know we’ve seen them.”

The driver hunched over his wheel, peering into the distance. “Hey. That look like a herd to you? Light’s going. It could just be one of those big flocks of
geese.”

Andrew half rose from his seat, peering
down the long slope and past the first loop in the road, where the landau was now laboring upward toward them.

“That ain’t
geese.” The lever operator spun a pair of wheels, and the engine groaned back into life. “That’s a herd, and that landau is dead in its path.”

He kicked a pedal as the wheelman spun his wheel, and the great engine turned down the face of the hill, its continuous track grinding stones and plants and small trees under and spitting them
up into the air at the rear.

“What are you doing?” Andrew yelped, grabbing onto the first things that came to hand, namely Errol’s shoulder and the back of the bench. “We’re off the road!”

“Won’t make it in time if we stay on it,” shouted the wheelman. “Hang on!”

They plunged down the slope at a precarious angle. All Andrew could see was the earth rushing up at them, as though he were falling out of the sky instead of rolling over the surface.

Tnt ="2em">hey crashed onto the last loop in the road for about ten yards, then took the next plunge over. And still the landau made its steady way up the first loop and into the second.

N
ow Andrew could see them in the distance—a thundering wave of animals, galloping, running, tossing their heads in the headlong joy of the moving herd. A herd that would break against the fragile landau with its precious human cargo, overturn it, and whirl it away in pieces, treading bodies into the earth under their galloping hooves.

No rifle could stop this tide—no man could throw himself in its way and hope to survive. The only thing that could save Claire and Alice and the children was this great lumbering behemoth of a vehicle,
if it could wedge itself between animals and humans in time.

“Faster!” he cried.

“We go any faster we’ll overset,” the steam operator roared. “Sit down and shut up!”

The continuous treads bit into earth that was not quite frozen, and chewed its way down the hill.

“We’re not going to make it,” gasped Errol, his eyes bugging out of his head in horror. “The herd is almost upon them!”

What was wrong with Claire that she didn’t see the approaching maelstrom of hooves and antlers and thousands upon thousands of pounds of hur
tling flesh? Could they not feel the drumming in the ground? Or see the grinding progress of the mining engine laboring toward them on its elephantine track?

“Claire!” he shouted, though of course she couldn’t hear. “Alice!”

The herd burst over the shoulder of the hill and poured onto the loop of the road, a hundred feet from the landau.

And now, when she should have been accelerating, the foolish female brought it to a stop!

“What are you doing?” he screamed.

Fifty feet.

The top folded back and Claire stood, the lightning rifle on her shoulder.

Forty.

Bracing herself against the steering lever, she aimed the rifle straight toward the center of the herd and fired.

A bolt of lightning leaped into the clear air like a pheasant exploding out of cover. It sizzled through the atmosphere, burning oxygen as it went, a foot
above the sharp antlers of the lead animals.

The enormous males snorted, bobbed, and in a move that was almost balletic, bounced to either side of the road. The herd parted like the Red Sea, one half washing up the slope between the landau and the mining vehicle, the other half pouring down the lower side. Then ever
yone stood—children, too—and waved their arms, making themselves a large, strangely colored organism that the caribou had never seen. Smoke puffed from the animals’ nostrils as they bounced out of reach of this strange apparition, and the pouring tide passed around them, then past them, and before Andrew could even think to draw his next breath, a thousand animals had regained their joyous momentum and were receding down the valley and into the distance.

The last cream-colored, boun-co regained cing caribou behind vanished into the trees and Andrew fell onto the bench as though it were he who had been shot.

“Who is that girl?” The steam tender recovered himself and got the vehicle moving again.

“She’s a dadburned fool,” the wheelman groused. “Putting eight people in danger, and for what?”

Errol gripped the bench, his eyes still wide. “Did you see that? Did you see her fire over their heads? What kind of rifle does that? And what kind of woman fires it?”

“A lady of resources,” Andrew said, feeling as winded as he sounded. “Just don’t ever ask her to dance.”

Claire drove the landau carefully up the loading ramp into
Lady Lucy
’s cargo bay, and began to shut down the boiler as Tigg leaped out to stuff sandbags against the wheels so it would not roll about during flight.

Not a minute later, Andrew came striding up the ramp under a full head of steam. “Claire, you lunatic, what on earth were you thinking?” he shouted.

The landau ticked softly to itself and settled onto its axles with a sigh. She turned, raising an eyebrow at his disheveled appearance and red face. Lunatic? Really. He of all people should know better than to call a woman such a thing, when a woman’s invention had just saved their lives.

“Can you be more specific?” she inquired coolly.

“At every point!” he shouted. “What possessed you to go to the village unescorted?”

“I had Alice and Tigg and the girls with me. Any more and we should have had to requisition a second vehicle.”

“You put their lives in danger, to say nothing of your own.” Andrew took a long breath, as if he were reining in his temper before it ran away with him. He gripped the top of the landau, his fingers tightening in a most alarming way. “I have never been so afraid in my life—not even in the pinnacle cell, or during the crash in the Idaho Territory. Claire, for the sake of my heart, please think before you do such a thing again.”

“She was helping me.” Alice came to her side and helped her disconnect the boiler, then replace the bonnet. “I went to find my pa, and since Claire is the only one who can pilot a landau, she took me.”

“We promised you lessons,” Claire remembered. “I must keep my promise.”

“Well, you won’t have to worry about me going out there again,” Alice assured her. “In fact, I’m going to pull up ropes shortly and be in the sky by sunset.”

“That’s exactly what Isobel Churchill said, and she was disappointed, too,” Andrew told them both. His tone still held an edge, but at least he was no longer shouting.

In fact, his gaze
as he watched Claire was so intense that it almost looked as if he wanted to pull her into his arms. A sign, a look, the merest softening, and she was certain he would do it.

“Cheer up, Mr. Malvern.” Maggie came to his side and took his hand. “The Lady wouldn’t ’ave let us be run over by them ruddy great creatures. It were touch and go there for a bit, though.”

He gazed at her for a moment, then sank to his knees and pulled the little girl into an embrace that was half relief, half …

Well, sometimes a gentleman could relieve his feelings by hugging a child, without other emotions being ascribed to it, could he not?

He released her and stood up, leaving Maggie looking both puzzled and pleased. “Just promise me that the next time you go rabbiting off into the wild
erness, you’ll let someone know.”

“We did,” Lizzie said. “That boy wot was our guide, he drew us a map.”

“Someone in charge,” Andrew said. “Someone in a position of responsibility.”

“Oh, they prob’ly would’ve told us not to go,” Lizzie informed him with airy unconcern. “Say, d’you suppose
Mr. Andersen ’as food on the sideboard? That grassy tea were nice, but it didn’t go far and me stummick is stickin’ to me backbone.”

They scampered up the ladder to the A deck, dragging Tigg with them.

Alice roused herself out of a brown study. Claire felt rather brown herself. The adrenaline of their near escape, the pell-mell journey back to the airfield with the mining engine practically climbing up into the steampipes, and Andrew’s show of temper, had worn off rather suddenly, leaving her nearly exhausted. Claire couldn’t blame the Mopsies for wanting to raid the sideboard. She could think of nothing better than to do the same—and seek her quiet cabin and Rosie’s soothing company immediately thereafter.

“I’d best be going, then,” Alice said.

“Please don’t,” Claire pleaded. “It’s nearly sunset, and you don’t want to fly at night.”

“Night, day, it’s no nevermind to me. I want to put this place to my rudder and get as far from it as I can.”

“Alice, what happened?” Andrew asked her, his eyes calming now, and filling with concern. “Did you find your father?”

“I did, and now I’m done.”

“But—”

“Andrew,” Claire said quietly. “Do not press her. We must instead convince her to stay at least until morning. Better yet, until after Count
von Zeppelin’s reception.”

“Absolutely not.” Alice backed away as if they were about to forcibly restrain her. “Fine, I can maybe see the sense in waiting to lift until morning. But I ain’t sticking around for that
hoedown. You can show him Nine and be done with it, if he wants to talk about automatons.”

“
It would be most unwise to snub the count, you know.”

“Why? I ain’t
ever going to see him again.”
<

Claire took her arm and shot Andrew a speaking glance as they made their way over to the ladder. “Do you not see what you are doing? You are cutting people dead right and left—people who could mean something to you.”

Alice went up the ladder like a monkey, as if she couldn’t wait to get away from the sound of Claire’s voice. But Claire could climb a wall with or without a rope. A ladder was nothing. She emerged onto A deck at practically the same moment, so that Alice could not escape.

“Please, dear, reflect upon what you are doing. This is a harsh land,” she said as they entered the dining saloon. “We all need friends if we are to survive here.”

Lizzie turned from the sideboard. “Alice, you said the same to them crewmen on t’cargo ship,” she said around a mouthful of fruitcake and marzipan. “Oh!”

“What’s wrong, Lizzie?” The girl was digging in her pocket. “Did you bite down the wrong way on a nut?”

“No, I forgot about this.” She handed over a gleaming cylinder of brass. “It’s like them other ones. I meant t’ tell you, I found it underneath that cargo ship. There’s a lot more ships now, but I mean t’first one, that were ’ere when we landed.”

M.A.M.W.

Claire handed it to Andrew. And a pair of facts settled into place in her mind, like sparrows landing together on a twig.

“Why didn’t I see this before?” she murmured. Then, “Does it not strike you as strange that Mr. Meriwether-Astor and his entourage should journey all the way here as part of his world tour?”

Andrew gazed at her thoughtfully while Alice nabbed a piece of cake for herself. “It does,” he said. “But I try not to comment on the vagaries of the wealthy. They are often beyond the understanding of mere mortals.”

She held up the casing. “This is the second time one of these has appeared where it does not belong. Do you suppose
M.A.
stands for Meriwether-Astor?”