Lady of Devices (16 page)

Claire’s heart twisted with remorse. “I did not kill Mr. Jackson on purpose, Willie,” she said as gently as she could, watching the street while she drove. Drat Tigg and his stories unsuitable for tender ears. “I’m afraid the lightning rifle fired by accident. And it won’t happen again, I promise you.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Lady,” Tigg warned. “It’s a hard life, wot we got.”

“No one knows that better than I,” she said with utter sincerity. “Which is why I shall do everything in my power to improve it for all our sakes.”

How that was to be accomplished was unclear at present, but she possessed a mind that relished such a challenge. At the moment, though, all she could think of was finding a quiet corner in which to sleep. She asked Snouts to set a watch on the landau to prevent its being stolen again. Then she, Willie, the Mopsies, and Rosie retired to the topmost room in the house, which featured bare wood floors, rather a lot of dust—and an actual lock upon the door.

“Tomorrow every single one of us shall clean this place from top to bottom,” she vowed. “And then I am tempted to return to Wilton Crescent to steal my own bed.”

The remnants of Lightning Luke’s gang soon found out she was a woman of her word. And in the course of their cleaning—amid mutters of mutiny—they discovered the wage of a good morning’s work. Claire had set the mother’s helper in motion in the upstairs room, and when she climbed the ladderlike stair to fetch it down to the next floor, she found the Mopsies bent over it, murmuring.

“What is it, ladies?”

Maggie straightened. “This device of yours, Lady. I think it’s ’ad a knock on its noggin.”

Claire bent to examine it. Repeatedly, it bumped against the wall, in the manner of a goldfish who does not realize it cannot pass through solid matter to escape its prison. How odd. “It is supposed to turn aside when it meets resistance,” she said to the girls. “I have never seen it do this before.”

“’Ow does it know it’s to turn aside?” Lizzie asked.

“With statick repulsion—rather like what happens when you put the wrong ends of magnets together.” At Lizzie’s blank face, Claire realized she would need to add rudimentary physics to the young lady’s education. “A solid object will intrude upon the statick field and cause the device to turn aside.”

“P’raps that wall ent solid.” Lizzie and Maggie stared at one another, wide-eyed. Then as one, they attacked. Claire had no more than raised a hand to stop them when a panel tilted backward, hinged from the top, and the girls tumbled headlong into the opening.

“Lady! Give us a light,” came a muffled voice. When Claire had fetched a lamp and Snouts, in case male assistance should be needed, they found the girls sitting on either side of an ironbound chest. “That’s why he had a lock on t’door,” Maggie told her with shining eyes. “’Ow we goin’ to open this mucky great strongbox?”

Together they dragged it back through the opening into the larger room. “Lucky job I checked Lightning Luke’s waistcoat afore I laid ’im t’rest.” Snouts pulled a small iron key from his pocket, popped the lock open, and lifted the lid. Maggie reached in and sifted pennies, crowns, and shillings through her fingers, her face slack with wonder.

“Well done, ladies.” Claire did not want to think about Luke’s final resting-place. She did not want to think about Luke or his demise at all. Not after the horrible dreams that had wakened her in the wee hours and stolen what sleep was left of the night. “You deserve every half-penny. Keep as much as you can carry in both hands.”

“’Twere the mother’s helper did it.” Lizzie regarded the device, now busy with the filthy plank floor of the room, with newfound respect. “P’raps it will find summat more’n dirt on t’other floor, too. Best we stick by it.”

Claire divided half of Luke’s ill-gotten gains among everyone in the house—which proved to be an excellent lesson in arithmetic for Jake and Tigg, who led the effort. “I shall take the other half to the bank,” she told Snouts privately, “and invest it in the railroads and the Royal Society of Engineers until we decide what to do with it. Personally, I think we should give it to the Society for the Protection of War Widows and Orphans. I am quite sure Mr. Jackson was responsible for the poverty of at least some of them.”

He gave her a doubtful look. “You’ll ’ave an ’ard time convincin’ this lot the widows an’ orphans deserve it more than they do. They’ll just think you stole it.”

She raised her chin. “I shan’t tolerate having my motives questioned. They have seen how fairly I deal. They will just have to trust me. Besides, none of this is really ours, Snouts. We
have
stolen it, not to put too fine a point on things.”

“Spoils of war, Lady,” he told her roughly. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. At least this roof don’t leak, an’ there’s enough artillery in the cellar to hold off anyone who disagrees wiv’ us for a month should it come to that.”

“It will not. We will not give the criminals and thieves of London any competition. We shall set our sights on a different arena entirely.”

With the comforting weight of money in her skirt pocket, she hired a carter with a steam-powered dray and returned to Wilton Crescent. It stood just as she’d left it, except that the note was missing from the sink, as was everything but the bedstead in Mrs. Morven’s room. Ah. That worthy lady must have relocated to Lord James’s establishment. At least she would be safe there. Claire directed the carter and his burly boy to load up every single other thing left in the house, including the bedstead, the linens, and the piano.

What of Gorse, then? He must have gone to the Wellesleys. Claire added
Send tubes to Gorse and Mrs. Morven
to the mental list that included
See Mr. Arundel about who owns the cottage
and
Eat something
. The cottage in Vauxhall Gardens might not be much, but it possessed a vacuum tube. With that, she could communicate and keep a tenuous thread connecting herself with her old world.

Claire had been trained practically since infancy in how to run a household. Or to be more accurate, her mother had led by example and Claire had taken refuge in books and experiments. She regretted now that she had not paid more attention to the practice of housewifery. Of course, the art of drawing up the menu for a dinner party of eighteen was slightly different from arranging the trip to market that would result in the production of food on the table for the same number. She doubted that Lady St. Ives had ever been to market in her life, much less in the company of a gang of cutpurses and street children who saw no harm in lifting an orange if they could get away with it. In their view, the sin lay in being caught.

But at the very least, writing out the list of items to be purchased each day gave the Mopsies practice in their letters, and each of them possessed such a sharp mind that they were never shorted by so much as a penny during the actual purchase.

The boy who had been so scornful of Snouts on the night they’d claimed the house—who introduced himself to Claire as Lewis but was called Loser by everyone else—proved to be a helpful ally once he realized that the Lady meant business and tolerated no nonsense. The disloyal were invited to leave, and as her reputation spread, the number of volunteers knocking at the river door became rather gratifying. Lewis flushed an ancient crone out of the warren of streets whom he claimed to be his grandmother. She may have moved at the pace of a stick insect, but she could cook, and as long as the larder was kept stocked, meals appeared at more or less regular intervals. They had no table to put them on at first, but one evening four of the boys came puffing along the bridge above the house bearing a ten-foot dining table that they claimed had fallen out of a boat. Claire closed her eyes and beckoned them in, and the table became headquarters for the poker players when it was off duty.

A full stomach and productive activity went a long way to ensuring the loyalty of the last remaining doubters in her abilities.

It went a long way to easing the knot of tension between Claire’s shoulders, too. She was managing. With no tools but her mind and no prospects but those she was able to open up herself, she was actually managing to create order out of chaos. The fact that accidental murder had opened up these gates of possibility was not lost on her. Not an hour passed that she did not look out at the river or the road, convinced that a party of vengeful criminals—or a steambus of Mr. Peel’s bobbies—were on their way to demand justice. But at this moment, as she piloted the landau back to Vauxhall Gardens behind the chugging dray with one eye on the road and the other on the balance of the piano, she reflected that circumstances could certainly be much, much worse.

She could be in gaol.

She could be lying dead in the street.

She could be doing needlework in the dim, sunless parlor belonging to her grand-aunts Beaton.

Over the next week, her motley household settled into its own peculiar rhythm. Mornings were dedicated to market, with accompanying lessons in economics and mathematics. Afternoons were devoted to sharpening the skills of the card players and to the introduction of chemistry and physics. Here Jake’s photographic memory proved invaluable—and it was he who, on the Wednesday after their arrival, finally returned her engineering notebook, her pencils, and dear Linnaeus to her.

“I figure you ent gonna cut out on us now, Lady,” he said gruffly as he handed them over.

“No.” She clutched the books to her chest, resisting the urge to check that no pages had gone missing. “I’m glad to see your confidence in my character is improving.”

He shook his head, and his chocolate-brown eyes met hers. “You either keeps yer word or I goes to the bobbies and tell ’em it was you what kilt Lightning Luke.”

Clearly she did not have to look as far as the road or the river for justice to be meted out to her. She was harboring it right here.

Since the kitchen was now the sole domain of Granny Protheroe, with occasional incursions permitted by Claire and the Mopsies should they be bearing groceries, the front parlor became the laboratory. No more did boys lounge on sofa and floor, drinking rotgut, smoking, and staying out of range of Luke’s gun. Instead, glass tubes and flasks appeared, along with retorts, Bunsen burners, and cells for the creation of electrick current.

Claire had no idea who had built Lightning Luke’s gun, but he or she had obviously been a genius. Her first task was to discover the source of its power. If she could replicate it, then they could make other devices and sell them. She would not be so silly as to replicate the rifle itself—she was neither metallurgist nor fool—but there were other mechanisms that might be devised.

In the meantime, her sketches and equations had to be translated into terms that her ragged compatriots could understand. Some gave up and joined Snouts at the card table. But some, like Jake, persevered even in the face of repeated failure, stubborn as stones and unwilling to allow capricious numbers and persnickety measurements to defeat them. Jake had the makings of a fine chemist. What a pity she had to fight his mistrust at every turn. Ah well. If she could not create a friend where none had been, then at the very least she would create a capable assistant.

In the evenings the poker players scattered to their chosen fields of labor. There they learned variations on the venerable cowboy poker, or invented them, and taught the others when they returned. One of Snouts’s variations in particular, Old Blind Jack, suddenly became the rage in even the most fashionable of London’s card rooms, to the point that strategy diagrams began to appear on the back page of the
Evening Standard
where illustrations of classic chess moves had held court for years.

Snouts just chuckled and bought his very first velvet waistcoat, tailored to fit.

Upon seeing it the Mopsies immediately demanded their own finery, and Snouts magnanimously handed over twenty pounds as though it were nothing. Claire had seen the account book they’d cobbled together out of the end papers of her books from Wilton Crescent, and in comparison to the money flowing through the boy’s clever hands, twenty pounds
was
next to nothing.

On the next sunny Saturday, Claire took the Mopsies, Tigg, and Willie to Fortnum & Mason to have them outfitted. Never again would she allow the likes of the chemist in the Haymarket to look at her charges in that manner. And once the salesladies had removed the children’s old clothes to the dustbin, their mouths pruned in disgust, and dressed them from the skin out in clean linen, cotton, and lace for the girls, and practical navy wool for the boys, Claire beamed at them proudly.

“You look as though you were visiting from Buckingham Palace itself.” She smoothed Willie’s sailor collar so that it lay flat across his shoulders. “Even Her Majesty’s grandchildren don’t look as fine.”

“The Princess Alice chose that very dress for her youngest,” the saleslady confided, nodding in Lizzie’s direction. “She took the blue hair ribbons, though, instead of the coral.”

Lizzie wavered visibly.

“Have the blue as well, if you like,” Claire told her. “Snou—I mean, Mr. McTavish would approve.”

Upon their return to the river cottage Claire discovered that Lizzie was in unrepentant possession of the saleslady’s purse, having picked her pocket as the lady was dressing her.