The Wicked Deeds of Daniel Mackenzie (10 page)

This parlor was not as crowded with keepsakes as the sitting room at the Mortimer house in London had been, but there were enough tables draped with cloth and covered with trinkets that would make brushing past them a disaster. Daniel navigated the safest path he could to a side chair under a gaslight, where he sat, pulling his kilt modestly over his knees. The giggling intensified. Likely the ladies had never seen a man in a skirt before.

Violet walked into the parlor, thanking the severe-looking landlady who had come with her to it. Giving the far door a hard look, Violet moved to Daniel, who had sprung to his feet.

“You are punctual,” she said.

“One of my many skills,” Daniel said, trying not to be obvious about feasting his eyes on her. “Punctuality.”

Violet didn’t look as refreshed from a night’s sleep as she might. Her eyes were red-rimmed, though her hair was pulled neatly into her pompadour, her shirtwaist buttoned to her chin, her skirt holding nary a wrinkle. Even with her slightly haggard look, her skin was flawlessly smooth, and her eyes—those dark blue eyes that could reach a man’s soul—fixed on him and wouldn’t let him go.

Violet held out a wooden box about two feet wide and one high, with heavy hinges and a sturdy clasp. “Take good care of it. It cost me a bit.”

“Oh, I will, lass.” Daniel took the box, unfastened the clasp, and peeked inside. The machine didn’t look like much—a metal casing, fan blades showing through a cage, and a few wires.

Violet gave the box an anxious glance as Daniel closed it, as though she’d handed a stranger her only child. “What will you do with it?”

“See if it will enhance an engine idea I have. I don’t have the engine here, but my friend down the coast has something close, and a vehicle for testing it. He’s letting me loose on it with my theories today, trusting man.”

“What kind of vehicle?” Violet asked, interested. “Is it a motorcar?”

The excitement in the question changed her. For a moment Violet the careful woman vanished, as did the Violet who used blunt rejoinders to keep those who might hurt her at bay. Daniel liked this Violet, curious and interested.

“Not a motorcar. I haven’t finished building mine. When I do . . . that will be a fine day.”

“What, then?”

Violet’s eagerness was unmistakable, as was the wistfulness with which she looked at the box. Daniel caught her hand in a sudden, hard grip.

“Come with me, lass, and see.”

Again the hesitation, the little frown, the quick look upward, to where her rooms lay. “My mother . . .”

“She can do without you one day, can’t she? With all these ladies here to look after her?”

“Well . . .”

Daniel tightened his grip. She needed this, and he needed it. A day spent in Violet’s company, with the opportunity to peel away her layers and find out all about her, was not to be lost.

“I’m not letting you say no,” Daniel said. He gave her what he hoped was his most promising smile. “Come on with me, and I’ll give you a day out you’ll never forget.”

Madness, absolute madness. Violet’s thoughts flipped one over the other as she sent word up to Mary that she was going out, possibly all morning and on into the afternoon.

The next thing Violet knew, Daniel was leading her out of the house, past the interested ladies who’d stuck their heads out of the next room to watch them go. He took her out into the street and pushed her up into his tall, hired carriage.

The coach took them to the nearest train station, and not many minutes later, they were boarding a train, for which Daniel had already bought two tickets.
Two
, the presumptuous man.

The train glided out of the city, steam pumping, bells clanging. Violet and her mother and Mary had arrived in Marseille at night, traveling through most of the southern part of France in the dark. Violet had seen nothing of the countryside. Now she trained her gaze out the window to high hills, swaths of empty fields, and cliffs tumbling to the sea, which was gray under scattered clouds. The winter wind was brisk, but the private train compartment was toasty warm, with coal boxes for their feet and oil lamps to chase away any darkness.

Of course it was a private compartment. Daniel, lounging back on the seat opposite her, seemed surprised when Violet mentioned it. When he traveled in England and Scotland, Daniel said, he often used his ducal uncle’s entire private car attached to the back of whatever train he wanted to take.

He said it casually, not boasting. In the next breath Daniel explained that when he didn’t take his uncle’s private coach, he rode rough by himself or with his friends in second class. But he’d thought Violet would appreciate the soft seats of first class today.

The statement brought home how different Daniel’s existence was from hers. Violet regarded riding second class as a luxury up from third, while Daniel obviously thought nothing of making a train wait while a separate car was attached for himself and his family. Violet and her mother had often hunkered in crowded stations waiting for privileges to be given to wealthy men like Daniel.

Daniel leaned back into the corner of his seat and swung his long legs up on the cushions, resting his hands behind his head as the train swayed on. He said, with a wink, that he didn’t sit next to her, because it was bad etiquette, as they weren’t related. Besides, she needed somewhere to put her machine.

The box rested next to Violet, she not wanting to put it on the rack above. The mechanisms could be delicate.

The journey to the small town near the coast took about an hour. They emerged from the train to the sound of seagulls and the smell of fish and brisk sea air. The wind was cold but not nearly as dank and bone-chilling as in London.

Daniel, speaking French with a strange mixture of Parisian slang and coastal dialect, hired a cart. He explained to its owner that he wanted to drive the cart himself, and reinforced his request with a large handful of francs.

The man laughed with Daniel, slapped the horse on the rump, and said in a dialect so thick Violet barely understood him, “Tell Dupuis, that old bastard, that I said he owes me money.”

Daniel grinned, helped Violet onto the front seat with him, and touched the reins to the horse.

“Sorry it’s not a better conveyance,” Daniel said as the cart jerked from the middle of the village up a steep hill. There was no other seat but the driver’s, and Violet was squeezed tightly against Daniel’s side. “The ducal coaches all seemed to be out.”

“It’s perfectly adequate.” Violet pulled her coat closer about her, but it was Daniel who kept her warm.

“You’re a sweetheart, you are. The females of my acquaintance, with the exception of my resilient aunts, would be shrieking in dismay. Pierces your eardrums, those shrieks. My aunt Eleanor, on the other hand, would tell them to buck up and enjoy the fact that they didn’t have to walk.”

“Isn’t your aunt Eleanor a duchess?”

“Aye, she is now. And she was an earl’s daughter, but she grew up without a penny, and learned how to fend for herself. You’d like her. You’d like my stepmum too. She’s as resilient as they come.”

“Your stepmother was a lady-in-waiting to the queen of England,” Violet said in a rather bewildered voice.

“What do ye think made her resilient? The queen, she doesn’t believe in heat in her drafty Scottish castle, and she’s a hearty woman. Very hearty. Her frail look and any worry about her health is a nice façade. She can ride around the countryside in her little cart all day long and then stay up all night demanding to be read to. Marrying Dad was a relief to poor Ainsley. Putting up with him is easy in comparison.”

Violet had never met anyone who talked about a queen behaving like a real person. A few of her mother’s clients had
believed
they were queens, or had been queens centuries ago, or claimed they knew the deceased Prince Albert. None of them had ever mentioned driving around in pony carts or skimping on coal in the palace.

Daniel, son of a lofty lord and nephew to a duke, drove the rattling cart and old horse with competence. “Not much longer,” he said after a time. He clucked to the horse. “Come on, old fellow, you can make it. Then a nice long rest for the afternoon, eh? Better than dragging a cart up and down a cobbled street all day.” The horse flicked his ears back to Daniel, seeming to like his voice.

Their destiny turned out to be an old farm in the hills away from the sea. This one looked ancient. Three wings of a two-story house surrounded a pitted courtyard, the house’s doors and windows facing the courtyard rather than outward to the land. Plaster crumbled around the walls’ wooden half-timbering, revealing worn bricks beneath. A barn and storage rooms took up the entire lower floor; the living quarters for the farmer and his family looked to be on the upper floors.

The farm, however, was long gone. The fields around them were overgrown, though farther away, on the next farm, neat plowed rows, bare with winter, lay ready for spring planting. The courtyard was littered with coils of metal and pieces of wood, and the only animal in the barn was one large draft horse.

Two men were carrying what looked like a giant basket out of the courtyard as Daniel pulled up. One of the men broke away from the basket and came to take the horse’s reins as Daniel jumped down. The man was large, with a hard face and a nose that had been broken more than once.

Daniel reached back and handed Violet out of the cart. “Lass, ye remember Simon? Who followed Mortimer to your house with every intention of beating five thousand guineas out of him? Or maybe you never saw Simon that night. He works for me now. Carry on, Simon. I’ll take care of the cart.”

While Violet stood aside and Simon returned to help the other man carry the basket, Daniel deftly unhitched the cart. He left it braked on one side of the courtyard, and led the horse past Violet to the stall next to the draft horse. He talked to the cart horse all the way, little endearments in his broad Scots as he gave the old animal a brief brushing down and made sure it had hay and water.

What kind of a man, with all the trappings of wealth, who could live the softest possible life, took the time to comfort a working cart horse?

Daniel seemed to think nothing of it. He emerged from the stall, took Violet’s box from the cart as he passed it, then led her out to follow Simon.

At the top of a hill was a flat, fallow field, which had been hidden from view by the wide house. In the middle of this field bobbed a giant bubble of red and yellow, half on its side, a buoy in a sea of dark earth. The bubble was being held down by four men, straining against ropes. Mr. Simon and the other man carried the basket toward it.

Violet stopped in her tracks. “Mr. Mackenzie, what on earth . . . ?”

“Monsieur Dupuis is lending us his balloon,” Daniel said. “For my experiments with your wind machine.”

Violet stared at the balloon, which was coming to life, men holding the ropes as though they fought to contain a wild stallion. “You’re going up in
that
? Now? With my machine?”

“Aye. Ye see, it’s my theory that hot air is a much safer and more useful method of keeping a balloon afloat than hydrogen gas. At the present time, though, if you want to use hot air, you fill up your balloon on the ground, and that’s all you have. You either have to tether the balloon for your ascent, or go wherever the wind blows you.
But,
I’m thinking that if I have an efficient heat source I can take on board, I can manipulate the balloon, not just float where it wants me to go. Understand?”

Violet blinked. “Not really.”

“If I can fix a good engine above the basket after the balloon is inflated, I can replace the hot air while I’m flying, and give the balloon a boost when I need it. I came up with the engine design, but never had a good way to shoot the heated air into the envelope while aloft—I don’t want it to burn up the blasted silk when I’m two hundred feet off the ground. When I saw your machine, with its efficiency of pumping out a great blast of air, I thought,
bloody marvelous.
”

Violet strove to follow his speech without looking too bewildered. “And you brought your engine with you?”

“No, but Dupuis let me tinker with one of his to make a similar one, and now I’m going to enhance it with your machine. My idea is to make hot air balloons dirigible—steerable—but smaller and lighter than the airships people are working on now. I’m thinking of making single-man crafts anyone can afford. You want to go across the downs and visit your friend in the next town? Hop aboard your own little dirigible and float there in comfort.”

“In good weather,” Violet said, looking up at the relatively clear sky.

Daniel shrugged. “Well, if it’s pouring down rain, you want to stay home by the fire anyway.”

Violet, who rarely had the luxury of staying home by the fire, gave him a skeptical look. “Won’t the machinery be too heavy for the balloon?”

“That’s what I mean to find out. Don’t worry—I’ve done a few test runs at my dad’s in Berkshire, and I’ve figured the ratio of weight to balloon size. That’s why I came to Dupuis. He’s a dedicated balloonist, experiments with several different kinds of them. He’s interested to see whether I can take a machine-driven balloon aloft.”