Her Own Devices (3 page)

Well, she was not prepared to flee now. No matter what he said, she would stand her ground and fight for what she wanted—which was to learn so much from Andrew Malvern that she could apply to The University of London to study engineering, and secure a letter of reference from him when the time came.

She dragged her attention from dreams of the future to the reality of the present. “Yes, I believe I said I would work in concentric circles, starting with the desk and moving outward.”

“I have no filing system,” he said meekly. “I trust you will institute one.”

She had never done such a thing in her life. “Of course. I will use the method that seems most logical.” She made it sound as if she had all the methods ever invented right at her fingertips, and he looked relieved.

“Right, then. I’ll leave you to get started. At midday I’ll take you and Tigg to lunch. We should celebrate your first day somehow.” He smiled, and she lost her iron grip on her mental to-do list.

Claire gathered her wits as he rattled down the staircase, and focused on the desk. Never mind the fact that he was continually throwing her off balance. She had work to do.

By midday, she had managed to clear the desk, leaving only the drawings he had been working on, an inkwell, his pens and blotter, and a heavy book he seemed to be referencing in the drawing project. She had made her way through the stacks of journals, academic papers, receipts, and reports, pausing now and then to read a particularly interesting one. He had been sitting on a newspaper, so she fished it off the chair and shook it out, ready to use it to wrap parcels or start a fire in the potbellied stove. As she folded it, an advertisement with a portrait on the back page caught her eye.

HAVE YOU SEEN THIS YOUNG LADY?

PLEASE WRITE W/DETAILS

C/O THE EVENING STANDARD

“Good heavens!” Claire flung the paper at the stove in a kind of convulsion, then recovered herself and snatched it up again.

Took it over to the round, curtainless window, where there was more light.

It had to be a mistake.

The portrait, taken from the senior class daguerreotype and reproduced in the
Standard
’s line-drawing-ink-blot style, was of her.

By the time Andrew and Tigg came up to fetch her, the
Standard
had burned to ash in the bottom of the stove and Claire was industriously wiping the inkwell with a clean rag.

This is what you get for not answering your mother’s letter
, she told herself furiously as she ignited the landau and waited for Andrew to fold himself into the passenger seat and Tigg to climb into the small space behind them where the articulated brass top of the landau ratcheted down on fine days.
She is reduced to advertising for informants
.

As soon as they got back to the cottage, she would write a firmly worded letter to Cornwall. This nonsense must stop. With her luck, Julia Wellesley would see the advertisement and turn it into the joke of the season—because of course, anyone who must make their living by default must have fallen off the social map.

“Will you direct me, sir?” She backed the landau around until its forward lamps pointed up Orpington Close, and released the lever that allowed the head of steam to move them forward.

“Ladies’ choice. What do you like?”

She liked a number of places—every single one of which would be swarming with people she knew who also read the
Evening Standard
.

Then again, what better way to spike the guns of gossip than to appear as if everything were normal and laugh it off as a curiosity? The drawing, after all, was not that good a likeness.

“I should love to go to the Swan and Compass, in Piccadilly. It’s favored by the Churchill set, you know.” She steered for the bridge, and pushed the lever out to the point that Andrew had to hang onto his hat.

“I say, what speed are we doing?”

“Thirty miles per hour.”

He exchanged a huge grin with Tigg over his shoulder. “Marvelous. I never thought I’d see the day.”

“It’s a new day, Mr. Malvern,” she said cheerfully as they gained the bridge. Fortunately there were not too many people or vehicles on it, though up ahead the traffic had slowed considerably as a dray backed into the street.

Once they were past it and on the Victoria Embankment, she slowed to a respectable pace. “Are you interested in learning to drive, sir?” she asked.

“You might well ask me if I’m interested in taking the transcontinental airship to South America and exploring the jungles.” He still gripped his hat, though they were hardly going fast enough to stir up a breeze. “Both entail laying out vast sums and risking one’s life.”

“No risk in an airship,” Tigg put in. “Safe as houses, I’ve ’eard. Not that I was ever in one. Closest I’ve been is seein’ ’em go over.”

“I was referring to the jungles. You are quite correct that airships are the safest and most efficient means of long-distance travel yet invented. But in answer to your question, Lady Claire, no, I have no desire to learn to drive. I have enormous admiration for those who do, however.”

He slanted a glance at her that she was forced to ignore, or drive right over some unsuspecting pedestrian. Goodness. It almost sounded as though he admired her. But that could not be so. He had hired her for her mind.

Which was just as it should be.

“Here we are.” She slowed to a stop half a block from the Swan and Compass, and by the time they reached the restaurant, she had regained her composure. He was only being kind. She must take people at their word, and stop reading personal meaning into casual conversation.

They were shown to a bright table in the window at the front, where they could watch people strolling to and fro on the sidewalk, and Claire saw Tigg watching carefully as Andrew pulled out a chair and seated her. With such an example, it wouldn’t be long before the boy would be absorbing more than chemical formulas and theories of physics. With the opportunities the world offered in this modern age, he would not be forced to remain in the sphere in which she had found him. They might make a gentleman of him yet.

A lady enjoying lunch in a restaurant, she had been taught, might nibble delicately on a bit of endive, and sip tea with a pastry. But Claire was ravenous, and her mother was at the other end of the country. She ordered steak and mushroom pie with a salad, and devoured it so quickly and neatly that even Lady St. Ives might have wondered if it was ever actually there.

“I like to see a good appetite,” Andrew observed, cutting up the last of his Dover sole. “My mother never could understand why it was necessary for titled young ladies to eat their dinners before they went out, so that it wouldn’t look as though they were actually hungry.”

“Was your mother taught that by her mother?”

“Oh, no. Mama was a cook in the Dunsmuir house. She had to send the young ladies’ dinners up in the evening before they went out. She used to say at least she knew the girls enjoyed something they ate that evening.”

“The girls?” Surely his mother had not been employed in the house of
those
Dunsmuirs. Do you mean the sisters of the boy who was ... ”

“The very ones.”

Tigg was looking from Claire to Andrew, clearly lost. “Wot boy? Wot ’appened to ’im?”

“You never heard the story?” Andrew refilled his tumbler with lemonade and offered Tigg another glassful. “The nursemaid was out in the garden one afternoon two years ago with the son and heir to Lord and Lady Dunsmuir’s fortune—the family owns practically the western half of the Canadas, you know, including vast diamond mines, and what they don’t own they have interests in—and she fell asleep in the sun. When she woke up, the boy was gone, and despite advertisements, an enormous reward, and the hiring of several Pinkerton men, no one ever discovered what happened.”

“Seems clear ’e wandered off. Somebody always ’as to keep an eye on our Willie, not t’mention the Mopsies. Curiosity on legs, every one of ’em.”

“He couldn’t have wandered off, though,” Claire said. “I recall a description of the house that said the garden wall was ten feet high and both gates were locked.”

“Eight feet, but yes. My mother says her ladyship was entertaining one of the royal princesses to tea, so the whole household was in an uproar. That’s why they’d gone out in the garden. The nursemaid had been hoping the boy would nap in his pram.”

“Those poor parents,” Claire said on a sigh. “They haven’t gone into society since. Lady Dunsmuir, apparently, would walk the roads at night—
asleep
. They have to lock her into her rooms.”

Andrew nodded. “My mother eventually gave her notice and retired. She said the sadness was too much to bear.”

“Claire?”

A crowd of gentlemen and ladies had come in, chattering like birds, and Claire looked away from Andrew to see Peony Churchill making her way between the tables.

“Claire, it is you! My goodness, where have you been? You’re quite the talk of the town.” Peony clasped her in a hug, then stood at arms’ length and looked her up and down. “You don’t look as if you’d been kidnapped, at any rate.”

“Certainly not. Peony Churchill, may I present my employer, Mr. Andrew Malvern, and his assistant, Mr. Tigg.”

Peony shook hands with both as if it were a matter of course, and Tigg’s shoulders went back, as though he were shifting the newfound burden of civility to make it comfortable.

“Will you join us?” Andrew said.

“Oh, no, I won’t impose. Besides, that lot will never forgive me—I convinced them to come here when they wanted to go to some awful dive by the river ‘just for the adventure.’” Peony rolled her expressive black eyes.

“Your mother is well?” Claire asked eagerly. Isabel Churchill—explorer, noted hostess, and political thorn in the side of many an M.P.—was one of her idols.

“Very well. You remember the Esquimaux delegation?”

“I do. There were so many in the house that the children were sleeping under the dining room table.”

“Yes, well, mama was unsuccessful in her pleas on their behalf, so she is preparing an expedition to the north of the Canadas to stir up as much trouble as she can in the diamond mines.”

Claire clasped her hands in sheer admiration. “She’ll be organizing labor unions among the Esquimaux next.”

“I’m sure that’s part of her plan—conditions in the mines are dreadful. I’m to go with her, you know. Now that I’ve graduated, there’s no earthly reason to hang about in London.”

“Aren’t you going to have a Season?” With a jolt, Claire remembered that she was to have been presented to Her Majesty to begin her own Season ... when? Oh, dear. What week was this?

“Me? Dance with a lot of boys who have more air in their heads than
Persephone
herself? Present company excepted, of course,” she added hastily as Andrew choked on a mouthful of lemonade.

“Oo’s Per Seffonie?” Tigg whispered to Claire.

“The transcontinental airship we were talking about earlier,” she whispered back. “The one that goes from here to Paris to New York and Buenos Aires.”

“I haven’t the least interest in a Season,” Peony went on. “But I am taking flying lessons. There will be no one to tell me I can’t be an aviatrix in the Canadas.”

“I don’t imagine there is anyone who can tell you that here, either,” Andrew said, smiling at her with such admiration that Claire practically interrupted him to say, “Before you go, Peony, do explain something you said earlier. Why should I be the talk of the town?”

Peony’s eyebrows arched in disbelief. “Good heavens, Claire, surely you didn’t think you could snub Her Majesty and get away with it?”

Oh, dear. Oh, dear, dear, dear.

“And don’t think she didn’t notice the resounding silence after your name was called at the Drawing Room last Tuesday. You could hear Julia and Catherine giggling down at the other end of the room, quite clearly.”

“Was—was she angry?” And here she’d been worried about her mother’s wrath. She’d never thought for a moment she’d provoke the ire of the Queen of the British Empire as well.

“Well, your absence was partly explained by the fact that you are still in mourning. All the same, you won’t be getting an invitation to tea anytime soon.”

Claire sighed. “It’s a lucky thing my social aspirations don’t reach those heights, then.” Unlike those of her mother, who had taken tea with the queen on more than one occasion.

Claire became aware that both Andrew and Tigg were staring at her as if they’d never seen her before. Peony kissed her and turned in a swirl of bottle-green velvet to join her party, leaving Claire looking from one to the other.

“What is it? Do I have gravy on my chin?”

Tigg found his voice. “Tea? Tea wiv the queen, Lady?”

“I believe the opposite is true. I will not, in fact, be taking tea with the queen, since I appear to have missed my presentation at court.”

“Court?” Andrew sounded like an echo. “You were to be presented?”

“Yes. But I was not.”
I was too busy burning down my rivals’ houses and keeping body and soul together to remember to present myself at Buckingham Palace
.

“But you could have been.”

“Yes, of course, had I not been in mourning. Mr. Malvern, please. I am sure Lord James has apprised you of my history and my family. I do regret concealing them from you at first.”

Andrew appeared to be struggling to speak, and Tigg just gawked at her. “Yes, he did,” he finally said. “And the newspapers augmented the facts with reams of supposition.”

The Arabian Bubble. Her father’s investment in the ridiculous combustion engine, and its subsequent failure. The Belgrave Riots.

Claire realized she needn’t have worried about missing her Season.

She had not been the most eligible catch in London to begin with. Now she might be lucky to get a baron’s son, or perhaps a widowed knight with a tumbledown estate and seven cranky children.

How fortunate that marriage had never figured heavily into her plans.

When they returned to the laboratory, pleasantly full and with wind-reddened cheeks, Tigg and Andrew stayed below while Claire went upstairs to tackle the next section of the Augean stables.