A Gentleman of Means (6 page)

“I am sorry to see that you prefer the dangers of the waterfront to the safety of our vessel,” he said. “I very much regret the action I must take, Miss Meriwether-Astor, but we cannot allow you the freedoms you have heretofore enjoyed if you cannot be trusted. I am afraid you are confined to quarters for the remainder of the voyage.”

He seemed rather taken aback at her language.

She hoped he had learned something.

Claire’s official title at the Zeppelin Airship Works was Junior Engineer, Flight Development Department. But she had been occupying space here for two weeks now, and had not yet had a chance to develop so much as a turnscrew, never mind anything approaching flight, despite her excellent credentials. She and Alice had, after all, invented the automaton intelligence system that Zeppelin was currently installing in all of his airships. It stood to reason that she should have begun the illustrious career she had been expecting in that hangar, but no.

Instead, she had been walked over to the Flight Development Department and informed by the person in charge that she would start at the bottom, as did every engineer who crossed the threshold.

“Can’t have the count accused of playing favorites, now, can we?” said the gentleman with every appearance of geniality.

“But the automaton intelligence system—I know it better than any person on earth save one. I should be working there.” In her black skirt and protective gray laboratory coat, Claire had tried to be firm and dignified. But all it had netted her in the end was a bare bench and a gleam of spite that, she suspected, revealed the man’s true feelings on the subject.

She hesitated to take her grievance to the count, though she was living in his palace and it would have been the work of a moment to visit his study after dinner one evening for a private conversation. But delicacy prevented her—that, and the stubborn conviction that if they wanted her to prove herself, she would do it so spectacularly that they would face reprimand for being so short-sighted as to hold her back.

So for some days now, instead of dusting her bare bench, calibrating Bunsen burners, sweeping floors, and asking Herr Weissmann, the department head, if he would like a cup of tea—oh, yes, they expected her to do all those things—she tinkered. She found gears that did not mesh, and flywheels that needed grease, and came in early in the morning to splice cable so that a signal might be detected in a ship’s engine room as well as in its navigation gondola.

In short, the Flight Development Department began to see an improvement in its production. The next stage was to generate memoranda. For every improvement, she documented what she had done, with drawings, and laid it on the department head’s desk. This went on for some days, until the morning she completed the cable project. When she took in her memorandum, she was so early that she discovered the previous day’s report still in the rubbish bin.

Pressing her lips together, she took it out, enclosed it with the completed report on the cable, and popped it in a tube addressed to the managing director’s office.

Not surprisingly, she was summoned thither at the end of the week.

She stood quietly in front of Herr Brucker’s desk, where a series of her reports was fanned out in front of him. “What is the meaning of this, Fraulein Junior Engineer?” he asked without preamble. “Why am I honored with so much information regarding the progress of your labors?”

“Because Herr Weissmann merely tossed them in the rubbish bin,” she said calmly. “I felt that the improvements to the process here ought to be documented so that others might change the procedures.”

His monocle fell out as his eyes widened, and he hastened to screw it back in. “Young lady, do you know the meaning of the word
insubordination
?”

“Of course,” Claire replied. “But I hardly see the relevance.”

“If the head of the Flight Development Department does not believe your reports are significant and chooses to disregard them, and yet you go over his head to bring yourself to the attention of his superiors—this does not strike you as relevant?”

For a moment, Claire was transported back in time to the Chemistry of the Home laboratory at St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies. Professor Grünwald’s tone had been very much like this, his underlying fear that she might be more intelligent than he becoming more apparent the more he spoke—and the more he attempted to discipline her.

But she was no longer the cowed seventeen-year-old she had been.

“I do not call it insubordination,” she replied. “I call it common sense. Count von Zeppelin is the last man on earth who would accept shoddy workmanship and deliberate stupidity among his employees. I am simply emulating his excellent example.”

“Ah, because you are such great friends.”

Claire inclined her head. “I consider it a privilege to have earned his esteem.”

“And you feel that you are undervalued in your present position, though it is one that has been honorably occupied by every engineer to pass through these doors?”

Here was a sticky wicket to navigate. “I am not averse to working my way up the ladder. I wish to be useful to the count. My only aim in writing these reports is to document ways in which, in the absence of a permanent assignment, I have been able to contribute to that end.”

“Do you believe it is useful to him and to this company to point out the faults of others?”

“If they have not been pointed out before now, then that is also something which might be improved.”

“Fraulein Junior Engineer, in the noble pursuit of improvement, let me point out a thing or two. We are not in the habit of brooking such arrogance and self-aggrandizement as this. It is one thing to do well in one’s assigned duties. It is quite another to believe oneself above them.”

Arrogance! Self-aggrandizement! Shades of Lord James Selwyn!

“I am above them—since I have been employed here nearly three weeks and have not yet been informed as to what exactly my duties are. I have a bench, with no parts or projects upon it. I have a department head who has not yet seen fit to assign me to a ship. I have an engineer’s ring and a mind eager to begin work, but I am expected to sweep floors and fetch tea. Tell me, Herr Brucker, would you not do the same in my place?”

He gazed at her for so long that she began to suspect that might have been the wrong question.

“I did do the same in your place,” he said at last. “I have swept my share of floors and fetched many a cup of tea.”

And here was the crux of the problem. He had accepted being treated like a janitor instead of an engineer, and had risen in the ranks for what appeared to be twenty years, his star finding its zenith in this third-floor office, this leather chair.

Her star was out there in the flight paths of Count Zeppelin’s mighty ships, plying the winds and wheeling over time and tide alike.

And therein lay her sin.

“You will return to your bench,” Her Brucker said in a tone all the more dangerous for its quietness. “You will fulfill your assigned duties with patience and goodwill, and cease this meddling in levels of operation far above your pretty head. Am I clear, Fraulein Junior Engineer?”

She could defy him. She could go over his head, too, and bring the shortcomings of the Flight Development Department to the attention of the vice president or even the count himself. But what would that net her except a widening circle of resentment, dislike, and quite possibly sabotage?

“Quite clear,” she replied, her jaw tight with the need to restrain herself from slapping him. “Shall I take my reports with me?”

“That will not be necessary.” With deliberate precision, he picked up each report by the corner and dropped it in the rubbish bin behind his desk. When he was finished, he folded his hands on its glossy surface and regarded her with something akin to triumph. “You are dismissed.”

She turned on her heel and left, practically hissing with rage. If ever the thought had crossed her mind that she might show someone besides the count her sketches for the power-generating fuselage skin she was calling the Helios Membrane, she abandoned it now. They should never get her invention.

Then she snorted, a sound of derision in the quiet laboratory. She could leave her engineering notebook on her bench for a month and nothing would happen to it. For it was clear that no one within two hundred feet would recognize what they were looking at.

*

That evening, while the girls were preparing their assignments for the next day, and Alice and Jake had gone back to
Swan
to see whether Ian could be persuaded to take some nourishment, Claire sipped her thimble of port and debated whether or not to approach Count von Zeppelin.

“You are a man,” she said at last to Andrew. “If you were in my position, what would you do?”

Andrew laid down his pencil and let the drawing he was working on roll itself up. “That is precisely the difficulty, my dear. I could not be in your position. There is a reason I maintain my own laboratory in Orpington Close, shabby and smelling of fish and mud though it might be. I am the sort of man who must be his own master—even more so now, since James’s departure from this world.”

She gazed at him. “I have always wondered what brought two men of such differing temperaments together. I could not imagine how you would have found companionship in one another’s company.”

“I would not call it companionship,” he reflected. “Certainly not friendship. I should call it rather a shared goal, with skills complementary to one another that made it possible to attain that goal.”

With a sigh, Claire put the tiny glass on the table at her elbow. “It distresses me that I find none of those things at the Zeppelin Airship Works. And I had such high hopes of it—of finding like minds with mutually agreeable goals. What shall I do if I am like you, Andrew, and unable to call men of lesser capability master?”

“There you go, being arrogant and self-aggrandizing again.”

“I know,” she said sadly. “It is becoming quite a failing in my character. I am glad to find a similar flaw in yours, otherwise I should be in danger of thinking you quite perfect.”

At this point the drawings were abandoned altogether and Claire rejoiced in the affections of a man whose attentions gave her as much pleasure as his conversation. She was reminded again that if she did not pay more attention to her wedding plans, she would be married to Andrew in her laboratory coat, and how disappointed Mama would be then!

When she extricated herself from his embrace, she tucked up the strands of her hair that had caught on one of his buttons and become disarrayed. “Andrew, tell me true, as the little ones back at Carrick House might say. Do you think I ought to go to the count?”

“Let me ask you a question in return.” He straightened his waistcoat. “If you do not, do you have the endurance to last in the Flight Development Department for as long as you must?”

If he had not told her his own feelings, she might have felt obliged to say yes. But here was another path, forming a third possibility next to the one labeled
Return to London a Failure
. But balanced against it were her obligations to the count: four years of university in exchange for her acceptance of the post. Room and board in the palace while the girls finished school.

“I cannot simply walk away from my obligations,” she said at last.

“Then there is your answer,” Andrew told her gently. “But I should not abandon a conversation with him altogether. He will still be interested in your feelings and, were I in his place, I should be deeply interested in a department that puts status before innovation.”

Andrew was right. She should speak to the count not for her sake, but for his. On Sunday after church, when she saw through her French doors that the count was inspecting the last of his roses in his sunny private garden, she slipped out and along the flagged path to join him.

“Claire!” His voice was warm as he indicated a yellow rose. “Look at this. She has been hiding in the foliage all summer, and now that the other roses have faded, at last she gets her chance to bloom.”

Might that not be a fitting epigraph for her own situation? Perhaps she could use it as a way to ease into the conversation she wished to have with him.

“What a pity that with the end of the season, her time in the sun will be so short,” he concluded.

Oh, dear. Perhaps not.

“I have not seen you all week.” He straightened and offered her his arm. “How is Captain Hollys? My personal physician tells me his health is not all it could be, and recommends that he be removed to England with all possible speed.”

Claire nodded, pacing beside him on the walk toward the gazing ball. “He informed us of that last night, as well. Alice is the only one free to take him home, but she is reluctant to leave the safety of friends, to say nothing of your sentries … despite the excitement lately.”

“I have confirmed that the medallions belong to the Famiglia Rosa,” he told her, his voice dropping although they were alone. “Those emblems stand for Venice, Naples, and Rome—the three cities ruled by the brothers di Alba. Frankly, I should feel more comfortable if she did go. It was clear that their target was
Swan
—and that the price on her head has not been removed.”

Claire could not bear it. To lose both her friends at once?

But of course she must not be selfish. Ian would do better in his own house, with his own physician, and Alice would be far safer in England than she appeared to be here.

“You are quite right,” she said. “Now that the repairs to the fuselage are finished, I will speak with her and find out when she can pull up ropes. We cannot risk any further danger to either of them.”

“And what of you? You will be sad to lose your friends, but as you say, it will be for the best. And you have much to occupy your mind here.”

Claire took a breath and leaped into the metaphorical breach. “Yes, I have been very busy with documenting improvements to the processes and equipment in the Flight Development Department.”

“Have you?” His brows rose—and since he had been looking into the gazing ball, his reflection seemed all circles and curves. He straightened to face her. “Are improvements necessary?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, rather more bluntly than perhaps she should have. “I am not meant for fetching tea and sweeping floors, I am afraid. So I fill the hours with fixing things and then documenting what I have done. Sadly, though, I have been asked to cease and desist. Apparently the managing director does not appreciate more paper arriving on his desk.”