Brilliant Devices

A lady of resources has
the power to change the world—if she can stay alive long enough to do it.

Lady Claire Trevelyan had been looking forward to glittering balls, congenial society, and relief from pursuit during her stay with Lord and Lady Dunsmuir in the Canadas. Well, perhaps not entirely. Being pursued by a handsome airship captain is rather diverting, especially when it appears her erstwhile employer, Andrew Malvern, is becoming much too distracted by a certain blond mechanic.

But a shot fired in the night puts an end to such diversions, and instead plunges her and her orphaned band of children into a fight for their very survival. Between secret conversations at the highest levels of society and skullduggery in the diamond mines, Claire must discover who is behind a series of alarming attempts on her friends’ lives—before her mother is compelled to make funeral arrangements yet again.

“Great fun, extremely feel-good reads that make you share all of the protagonists’ journeys and victories … an excellent steampunk series.” —
Fangs for the Fantasy
: The latest in urban fantasy from a social justice perspective

Kindle edition.

Cover layout by Ann Bui Nguyen.

Cover
art by
Phat Puppy Art
,
used under license.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author. This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogue in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

For my readers, with thanks for flying with me on this adventure

Thank you to geologist Jenny Andersen for her research into diamond mines

Brilliant Devices

Copyright 2013
by Shelley Adina Bates

The Evening Standard

October 9, 1889

TITANS OF MODERN INDUSTRY DIE IN TRAIN CATASTROPHE

In a tragedy that strikes at the very foundations of society on two continents, one of London’s brightest lights and most brilliant minds, Lord James Selwyn, of Selwyn Park, Shropshire, and the leader of modern railroad invention in the Texican Territories, Mr. Stanford Fremont, have both lost their lives in a train wreck on the plains of the Wild West.

Both men were traveling west on the inaugural journey of the
Silver Queen
, the newest locomotive in a vast railroad empire that stretches from New York in the Fifteen Colonies to San Francisco, the capital of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias. Accompanying Lord James was his fiancee, Lady Claire Trevelyan, of London.

The journey was to be a showcase for Lord James’s latest invention, the
showpiece of the newest exhibition at the Crystal Palace, the Selwyn Kinetick Carbonator. The Carbonator had produced enough coal to power the locomotive and several luxury coaches, as befitted Fremont and his titled guests, with only two stops to take on unprocessed coal during the entire journey across the Wild West.

However, on the second day out of Santa Fe, disaster struck. From what the Texican engineers can piece toget
her from the wreckage, the arid atmosphere of the salt flats caused the coal to ignite prematurely and with such vehemence that it caused the tender and boiler to explode. The locomotive was blown off the tracks, and the passenger coaches jtmogt"umped the rails, resulting in total loss of life.

Funeral services for Lord James Selwyn will be held at St. Paul’s on
Friday, the eleventh of October, at eleven o’clock in the morning. His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, patron of the Royal Society of Engineers, is expected to address the mourners. Services for Lady Claire Trevelyan will be held privately at the family estate in Cornwall.

This publication humbly extends its condolences to the Selwyn and Trevelyan families, who have been beset with tragedy in recent months.
As our readers know, Vivyan Trevelyan, Viscount St. Ives, was killed in a mishap while cleaning his antique pistols. Old Lord Selwyn himself passed away recently. With the death of Lord James, his only son, the baronetcy now passes to a cousin, Peter Livingston, who recently announced his engagement to Miss Emilie Fragonard, of Cadogan Square.

*

Claire Trevelyan smoothed the newspaper on top of the navigation chart. She had been encouraging the Mopsies to read the easier headlines aloud, until they had all stumbled upon this particularly grisly one in the “World” section.

“My poor mother. No sooner does she cancel my first funeral than she must immediately plunge into plans for my second.”

Andrew Malvern looked up from the tiller, where he and Jake were jointly calculating how much altitude the airship, the
Stalwart Lass
, would have to gain in the next hundred miles to take them over the aptly if unimaginatively named Rocky Mountains.

“We can send a pigeon as soon as we reach Edmonton. That paper is
a week old. The funeral will already have been held, so there is nothing you can do to forestall it.”

Maggie laid a hand on Claire’s arm. “Yer mum’ll be happy to
’ear you ent dead again, Lady. Funeral or no funeral.”

“She’s going to stop believing in reports of my demise after this, that is certain.” Claire angled the paper down so Maggie could see it. “Can you read this line to me?”

“Wiv the death of … Lord James, ’is only son, the … Lady, I dunno that one.”

“Baronetcy.”

“I beg yer pardon, wot’s that?”

“It’s a title, Maggie. It means that if you met
Peter Livingston, whom I once seated next to my friend Emilie at a dinner party because she was sweet on him, you would call him Lord Selwyn. Once she marries him, Emilie will become Lady Selwyn.”

“Instead of you.”

“Quite right. Instead of me. I’m sure her mother is delighted that there is no longer any danger of her being left off the guest lists at dinner parties.” Claire sighed, gazing out the expanse of glass that formed the upper section of the
Stalwart Lass
’s gondola. “To think that I once worried about such things.”

“We’ve got other things to wors things try about,” Alice
Chalmers called, coming along the gangway from the engine at the rear of the gondola. “She’s not giving me any lift at all—it’s everything I can do to keep her airborne. We can’t take a run at those mountains unless Andrew and Tigg can pull a miracle out of their hats.”

“Ent got a hat,” hollered Tigg from the back.
“Alice, come ’ere!”

“Or a miracle.” Andrew turned from the tiller and ran a finger down the chart on the table, moving the newspaper they’d picked up in Reno to one side.
“If we don’t get some lift in the next couple of hours, we’re going to run smack into the side of a mountain. Some of these are thousands of feet high.”

Claire, whose idea of mountains had been formed
while on holiday in the Lake District, could hardly imagine it. “Can we not go around them?”

Andrew shook his head. “Not unless we want to return to Reno, sail east, and turn north on the other side.”

“Alice!” shouted Tigg. “We got trouble!”

Alice turned and ran astern, Andrew and Claire hot on her heels.
“What’s the matter? The ship was flightworthy when we left Reno,” Claire said to Andrew’s back.

But that had been two days ago. As she
now knew, anything could happen to an airship in two days.

“She may have been, but whatever old wreck of an engine she put in here, it wasn’t meant to go much farther.”

“It saved your hide, if you recall,” Alice snapped, popping into view from behind the engine cowling. “Don’t go calling my girl names.” Tears flooded her eyes and she blinked them back.

“I apologize,” Andrew said at once. “
And I hadn’t forgotten. I never will, you may be sure of that.”

“And mine, too,” Claire put in. “Twice. I’ve never seen anything so beautiful as the
Stalwart Lass
coming through the sky, both times.”

“She’ll be fallin’
out
o’ the sky if we don’t do summat,” Tigg put in tersely. His round, coffee-colored cheek had a smear of grease across it from chin to temple, and he held a wrench in either hand.

The words were no sooner out of his mouth than something deep in the engine hitched and coughed.

“That’s done it.” Alice grabbed a safety line and clipped it to a metal loop on her leather belt. “Don’t fail me now, girl.” She grabbed one of the wrenches and leaped down onto the propeller housing. The wind slapped her pants flat against her legs, and she pulled her goggles over her eyes. One look at the great shafts that powered the propeller must have told its own story. “Who’s on the tiller?” she shouted above the sound of both engine and wind. “We’re going to go down!”

“Jake!” Claire ran forwar
d. “Alice says we’re going down!”

Maggie gasped and clutched her twin, Lizzie, who th Lizzie burst into tears. “I knew it! I knew I should ’ave stayed home and not mucked about in airships.”

Claire grasped both their hands and drew them over to the glass, controlling her own panic with a herculean effort. “Look. We’re not in the mountains yet.” Though they loomed in the near distance, tall and blue and forbidding, rimed with old snow. “Remember what Captain Hollys told us on
Lady Lucy?
Airships don’t crash. It’s a long, slow glide to a soft landing.”