Gilded Lily (12 page)

“No torpedoes fired today, Mr. Furneval?” O'Brien asked, as they slipped through the chilly waters of the channel toward their berth. “What about the big squid, then?”

“Not today,” Rollo confirmed, taking his seat again and lacing his fingers together as he considered his options. “We'll have to wait until we can assemble the fleet, I think. We're going to need more submersibles.”

 • • • 

F
ORTUNE SMILED UPON
Freddie when she learned that Sophie was planning a small house party for the following weekend. This was rare for the widow Wallingford, who usually preferred to avoid inviting speculation about her love life. House parties were notorious opportunities for liaisons, and people would surely gossip about whomever she chose to invite. As she told Freddie, however, she couldn't bring herself to care.

“It's simply too hot in town already,” she'd complained. “It's not yet June, but it's dusty and horrible and the flies are in full force. Some fresh air will do us all good.”

Freddie didn't want fresh air. She wanted the close, intense atmosphere of an undersea catacomb, or the no doubt stale and stifling environment of a tiny submersible vessel.

“The country does sound delightful. But do you think you could spare me?”

“Spare you? I suppose so. Or would you rather I invite Lord Smith-Grenville along too? I'd planned to, you know.” The older woman refreshed her own cup of tea and smiled at her in a knowing way, which Freddie felt in no position to rebuke. “Do say you'll come. My favorite mare has foaled, and by all reports the baby is absolutely darling. Well worth the trip.”

“I'd like to go. Or rather . . .” She was venturing into novel and dangerous territory. Sophie was her oldest, dearest friend, but Freddie was well aware that her antics had long pushed at the limits of Sophie's comfort. Though Sophie wasn't above a little subversion, she might well balk at something of this magnitude. And it was a great deal—perhaps too much—to request of a friend. Still, there was no knowing until she asked. “I'd like to say I'm going, so Father won't expect me in the house for a few days, and then skip the party to go do a job of work that's a bit more complex than my usual.”

“Oh, Freddie.” Sophie put her teacup down too abruptly, clinking the china and nearly sloshing the contents in her haste. “What are you up to now? Does Lord Smith-Grenville know about this?”

“Of course. He's coming with me.”

“He's
what
? Oh, don't tell me you're planning to elope. I know I'm the worst chaperone in the world, but I simply won't have an elopement. Your mother would murder me.”

Blushing to her forehead, Freddie took up her tea and took an overlarge sip to bolster herself. “It isn't. We're not eloping. We're not—he's the man my father hired to watch me, not—”

“Fine job he's doing too.”

“That's what Dan said.”

“Daniel Pinkerton is a fine, sensible young man, and you ought to pay more attention to his advice.”

“We are not eloping. I can't say exactly what our plan is, because the less you know, the better. But I should think you'd be the last person to suspect me of planning to elope, Sophie. Where on earth did you get such an idea?”

Her friend's serene brow wrinkled the tiniest bit, the closest to a frown Sophie ever allowed herself to get. “I've seen the way he looks at you. I know that look. Too well.”

“You've seen Barnabas look that way before?” Was he in the habit of mooning after young ladies? She wasn't at all sure she liked that idea.

“No, not on Lord Smith-Grenville.” There was a subtle rebuke in her voice at Freddie's familiarity. A much-needed one too. Freddie should be more careful to use the man's proper title. “Although there is a strong family resemblance.”

“His brother.”

“Phineas.” Her lovely mouth curved around the name, turning it into a sensual talisman of sounds.

They had been on a first-name basis, just as Freddie and Barnabas were and shouldn't be.

“Oh, Sophie. How?”

“Not easily. But my father was occupied with keeping his creditors at bay, and my mother took ill for over a fortnight that Season so I had an unprecedented bout of freedom. Events I wouldn't have normally attended. Driving out with groups of friends. Wallingford seemed primed to offer for me, and I'd complied with all their instructions to encourage him, so I think they were also inclined to give me my head and let me push on to the finish. Which I did, of course.”

“Eventually.”

“Thomas never imagined he had my heart, Freddie. That wasn't part of our arrangement. He had someone else, you know. Someone he could never be public with. We did become friends, and we even tried for an heir before he grew ill. It was far from unpleasant, to be honest. I was faithful to him. But neither of us ever thought it was love. He and I understood one another perfectly.”

Freddie suspected many marriages made do with less, and she knew her friend had been relieved to free herself from her family's clutches. Grateful to Wallingford, and happy in her new life. But it still sounded sad, deeply so, now that she knew how steep the cost of Sophie's liberation really was. She would never have been allowed to marry Phineas, but to turn him away in order to accept the ring of a man she had no hope of loving must have been unbearably bitter.

“What happened, then?”

“We met on one of those drives. Phineas was on leave and visiting a friend in London. It was as if we'd known each other all our lives. He didn't want to hear that I was already spoken for. We quarreled when he found out the engagement had been formalized, but we still corresponded for a few months afterward. He tried everything he could think of to persuade me. The next chance he got, he came again to see me. That was a few days before my wedding. It ended in tears.”

“Had you told him why—?”

“No,” Sophie snapped. “How would that have helped anything? I made my own choice. You want to paint me as a tragic heroine, Freddie, but I was never that. You mustn't think that way. My life is not a Gothic novel. Yes, my aunt was put into an asylum shortly after she refused a promising engagement. Yes, my parents felt free to remind me of that, and the knowledge was ominous at times. But what you've never seemed to accept is that
everyone
in the family truly believes Aunt Elizabeth is a lunatic, whether or not she actually tried to kill herself. She was never quite right, even as a young girl. And they kept me so close because they were terrified of what might happen to
all
of us if I didn't marry well, or if I started to behave as Elizabeth had and
couldn't
marry. It's not as though they were profligate. Father inherited most of his debts and saw a chance to clear them in one go. Besides, the laws have changed considerably in the last twenty years. My solicitor now says they never would have managed to have me committed, even if I turned down a proposal from the Prince of Wales himself, so the implied threat was an empty one.”

“You didn't believe so at the time.”

“I could have run off with Phineas. If I'd truly wanted to, I could have. I decided to accept Wallingford because I wanted to please my family and ease their circumstances. And I wanted a comfortable life for myself too, more than I wanted the uncertainty of aligning myself with a young officer I thought I loved but barely knew.”

Freddie's own stakes were not quite so high. She clung to her life of luxury, true, but there was no romance attached to the other option to lend it urgency. Nor would her family suffer financial loss if she ever did make that choice. She had it easy in every way, compared to her friend. If only it
felt
easy. Her trouble was she wanted both things, her family's regard and support
and
the freedom to go forth and tinker. Finding a way to have both had become something like an obsession for her lately.

Sophie might have superb control over her emotional display, but Freddie had never perceived her as cold or calculating. Now, seeing the fine house in Belgravia, the delicate china, Sophie's muted but elegant dress in the latest style, she tried to imagine how she might choose, if presented those same drastic alternatives. True love at the price of possible penury, and the loss of one's family, who must then suffer financial disaster? Or the chance to secure everyone's future, at the cost of one young man's heart?

In a romantic novel, the choice would be obvious. True love must always win. In real life, however, the handsome young lover might not turn out to have a secret fortune stashed away, to be revealed only once he knew the heroine was picking him for the right reasons. And the nasty, grizzled, rich old husband of necessity might in fact be a soft-spoken, kind gentleman in poor health who simply didn't want to spend his final years alone. It all bore further consideration, but for now she had more important concerns.

“I am truly not planning to elope with Phineas Smith-Grenville's brother. I am not planning anything romantic,” she insisted, stretching the truth a bit more than she knew she should. “I only need a few days.”

Sophie shook her head, then sighed again. “Two. You can have two days. Saturday as early as you like, you can be off and do what you need to do. By Sunday afternoon you report back here, with Lord Smith-Grenville, or I'll go to your father.”

H
E COULDN'T TAKE
his eyes off her. At some point, Barnabas knew that might conflict with the impression he was trying to give of being a naval officer. Military men weren't encouraged to sneak glances at one another's bottoms and think lascivious thoughts, as far as he was aware.

To be fair, it wasn't
only
her bottom that drew his interest, in part because her smart, double-breasted uniform coat covered much of the body part in question, so only tantalizingly brief glimpses were available. No, it was the whole of her, the
Freddie
-ness, that appealed. The very fact that she'd orchestrated this excursion, that they were descending into a secret tunnel to explore an undersea station and possibly steal a submersible while they were at it, all because some fishermen were out of work . . . the
certainty
she projected, that this was a justified and appropriate course of action. Her conviction and bravery astounded him. The facts of her life, as she'd managed somehow to arrange them, amazed him.

She defied belief, and she put him to shame, because she made things happen instead of waiting for them to come along. Barnabas was beginning to feel as though he had only ever existed on the fringes of his own life, instead of inhabiting it fully and turning it into what he wanted. Even this job, he had taken at somebody else's suggestion. Only recently had he started to ask himself, why? Why was this search for Phineas so important to him, when even their parents had come to peace with the loss of their younger son? As yet, he had no answer for himself.

“Remember, if there are workers in the vestibule, we ignore them and move forward. Keep your eyes on the tunnel entrance, and if the velocipede is there just climb aboard and get ready to pedal. Let me handle starting it up, while you look at your papers and act disinterested.”

“I'm not completely unfamiliar with engines, you know. I can strip a steam car to parts and rebuild it. I could have sorted out what to do myself, given time.”

“But even I, who did sort it out, had difficulty operating the thing smoothly. Now I've had a few times to practice, while you've had none. Besides, you'll look like the senior officer. It makes sense for the junior to have to crank up the engine.”

“If it's there at all. If it isn't, we'll have to turn back. We can't walk to Le Havre, it must be three hundred miles.”

They'd had this argument before, with Freddie insisting on exploring as far as they could even on foot, and Barnabas refusing to venture into the tunnel again except in whatever ran on the rail. As the lift was slowing toward a halt, he finally brought out the trump. “If that tunnel really does run all the way to France, nobody would ever walk into it on foot. Where would they be going, on foot down a featureless three-hundred-mile tube? We
have
to take the vehicle or the workmen will know something is amiss. If it isn't there, we can only act surprised and annoyed and leave with all due haste.”

She scowled at him a moment, then: “Blast.”

The door rattled open and they strode into the vestibule, heading straight toward the tunnel. Barnabas could feel the handful of workers looking, studying them. Identifying their features for future identification, possibly. Sweat formed on his brow and he forced himself to unclench his fingers when they began to crumple the sheaf of papers he held. He heard the noise of a saw blade and then a creak of metal on metal behind him as the men resumed whatever they'd been doing.

A cart was waiting for them, and he wasn't sure whether he was relieved or thrown into a panicked despair. Either way, it felt almost like swooning. This was no humble pedaled vehicle, but a full-fledged carriage of newly polished wood and brass, with plush velvet upholstery on its benches. Brave Freddie marched straight up to the shiny, teacup-shaped thing and started turning a crank on what must be the engine casing near the base. As Barnabas mounted the step and swung himself into the forward-facing seat, the motor purred into life, much quieter than he was expecting.

“I'd love to know what's under the bonnet,” Freddie murmured as she joined him, sitting opposite and perusing the control panel with a nonchalant eye. “Another Stirling engine, I'd be willing to bet, but it sounds like nothing I've ever seen or heard of. Can you reach that panel behind you on the wall? There's a flame symbol on it. I think it might activate a light. Or a fire alarm, one or the other.”

“We'll find out,” he muttered back, reaching for the panel and just managing to tap it with his fingertips. Tiny green bulbs guttered into brightness along that wall, illuminating an eerie path down the tracks that disappeared into the darkness.

“That's better than nothing,” she said with a shrug. “Although this time . . . ah, yes.” With a decisive gesture, she flipped one of the myriad toggles on the panel, and a headlamp blazed to life. Another flick, and Barnabas heard a ratcheting sound as the carriage shifted into movement. Slow at first, probably because the engine was still heating, and it took time to build up momentum.

By the time the thing was at top speed, he longed for the relative sedateness of the velocipede. The green lights blurred into a solid line on the wall beside him. The headlamp illuminated a woefully short distance ahead of the cart and created, for Barnabas, the constant sensation that something was going to fly at his face from the suddenly violated darkness of the tunnel.

I must not be sick
, he told himself over and over.
I must not be sick, I must not be sick.

He checked his chronometer when they flew past the first set of portholes, easier to spot this time with daylight filtering down through the water of the channel. It had taken a mere twenty minutes, compared to thirty on the velocipede, to reach that point.

“Do you mind if I join you on that seat?” Freddie asked. Her voice sounded strained. “Sitting backward, I feel like something's going to loom up behind me at any moment and whack the back of my head.”

He nodded, lips clamped firmly together, and slid over to make room. He'd have liked to commiserate more clearly, but feared to speak lest he lose his already tenuous control over his protesting stomach.

She took the space next to him, looking forward with a groan. “I'm not sure this is any better.”

“At least we'll see it coming.”

It never came. After the first quarter hour or so, the fear wore itself down into boredom. Freddie's tentative math regarding the time to reach Le Havre had been based on the apparent speed of the velocipede in reaching what had appeared to be the mouth of the Thames estuary. As she had only the roughest gauge of the actual distance, and the carriage seemed to be traveling faster than the velocipede, all she could do was guess at how long their journey would take. Four hours was her estimate.

At first, they sat, not saying much. Then the silence grew intolerable, but as neither of them had spoken in so long, neither seemed willing to speak first. Finally, Barnabas cleared his throat.

“I need to talk or I'm liable to fall asleep.”

Thank God.
“What would you like to talk about?”

“You. How did you learn to pick locks, anyway?”

“That's what you want to know? You could ask me anything, and you choose that? It's not very exciting. I taught myself, mostly.”

“Yes, but . . . why? You said your parents didn't lock you in, so you obviously didn't need to escape.”

She considered that, the earnest belief with which he'd said it and the instinctive clench of her stomach at the idea. “Just because you're not locked in, doesn't mean you have nothing to escape. I'm not trying to wax metaphorical, I simply mean that there's escaping
from
and escaping
to
. But that doesn't really answer your question, I know.”

“No. You don't want to answer my question. Forget I asked.”

They would be there for hours, and awkward silence would only make the time go more slowly. She might not be used to conversing this way with anyone, but Barnabas had proven himself a good listener thus far.

“It's all right. There's nothing sinister involved. It's just . . . complicated.”

“We have time,” he pointed out needlessly.

“All right. When the war ended and my family moved from London to Le Havre, we settled in a rather large manor house in the countryside. Huge, actually. It had belonged to some ancient, aristocratic family who'd lost their fortune, and it had been empty for close to a decade when we moved in. Father, Mother, and me.”

“No siblings?”

“No, just me. And I'd spent most of my formative years in the London house, which always seemed crowded with guests and family. Everyone on top of each other. I'd never been in a house as big as the one in France, or in a place so empty. There were a dozen or so servants, naturally. But other than my governess, I hardly saw any of them. As a child, I felt very much alone there. And with my father spending so much time at his factory, and Mother often away visiting old friends or reacquainting herself with Paris, I truly was by myself there most of the time. Eleven years old. Nobody to play with, no shops or sights to see. Just miles of coastline. Every so often Father would take me to the factory with him, and it was the best place on earth. I would have happily gone every day. I dreamed of a day he might even allow me to work for him, with him. But most of the time he left me at home where I was lonely, and terribly bored.”

He knew her well enough by now to smile and shake his head. “Oh, dear.”

“I'm afraid so. I was an intrepid little girl—”

“This does not surprise me.”

“Hush! I was too intrepid for my own good, and the only way I knew to manage fear was to be bold in the face of it. I was bored but also terrified, you see. Of that big, spooky house, especially the closed-up wing my father had forbidden me to enter.”

“He might as well have laid a trail of candy to point the way.”

Freddie nodded. “It's as if he had designed it specifically to entice me. I set out to explore, and it wasn't long before I came up against locked doors. There was nothing for it but to open them, and I didn't dare risk stealing the housekeeper's keys. I had hairpins, I knew the basic principles of lock design, and I had plenty of time on my hands, so . . .”

“What was your governess doing while this was going on?”

“Carrying on an affair with my father's valet. He still used one back then. I thought it quite romantic. Anyway, I learned to pick the locks, which weren't all that complicated as it turned out. I explored the mansion and conquered my fears.”

Barnabas tilted his head, acknowledging her accomplishment. “And what did you find in your explorations? Treasures? Skeletons?”

“Yes, actually!” She giggled when he affected to look appalled. “Mouse and rat ones. And a tiny, perfectly preserved bird skeleton on one hearthstone. Also some furniture that hadn't been fine enough to sell or light enough to steal. A beautiful crystal chandelier shattered on the floor in an empty ballroom, because the ceiling was rotten. Fortunately I hadn't yet tried to walk in the room overhead, or I might have fallen straight through on top of all that mess. Let's see, what else? Several lovely books, most of which were full of bookworms but a few of which I was able to salvage. A forgotten menagerie of tiny clockwork toys that I appropriated for experimenting on. Most of them were broken, which turned out to be instructive. And a single diamond ear bob lodged in a crack in the floorboards of what appeared to have been the lady of the manor's boudoir.”

“Real diamonds?”

“Yes. You've seen me wear them. I told my parents I'd found the thing in the upstairs parlor, where I was allowed to be, and they praised me for having such sharp eyes. When I was older, Mother had the stones set into a pendant for me. They still don't know where I really found it. And they thought the clockwork menagerie came from the nursery cupboard.”

He shook his head, equal parts admiration and pity. “That's amazing, but still . . . terrible too. Poor little thing. It's lucky you didn't kill yourself wandering around alone in all that decrepitude.”

Freddie recalled the days spent creeping through the silent, dusty halls, the thrill of even the most insignificant discoveries, and the rank terror that had claimed her on a few occasions. Like the time she'd tried to shove a heavy curtain aside to let light into one of the rooms, and the rotted fabric had torn from its rod with no warning to fall on top of her. She'd screamed and screamed, batting at the suffocating velvet until the thick dust and mildew nearly choked her. In her panic, she was sure somebody had accosted her, and she struck out in front of her rather than seeking the edge of the curtain. And then by some accident she found it, and burst forth into air and sunlight, whipping the assaulting cloth away from her body in a final glittering shower of dust particles. They danced in the sunbeams long after her heart had stopped its mad racing.