Scarlet Devices (22 page)

“Perfect. Now the only problem left is how to get Matthew up and out of that window.”

“Eliza?”

“Yes, Matthew, I'm here.”

“Oh, all right then. I love you, you know.”

She sighed. She knew, but it was problematic in so many ways for Matthew to say it aloud. “Yes, I know. Let's get you on your feet and out this window. And not a word out of you, Cantlebury.”

“Madam, I wouldn't dream of it.”

 • • • 

T
HE WINDOW TURNED
out to be the easy part. The tricky bit was herding Matthew along without rousing the guards, particularly when he spotted the crescent moon and wanted to sing to it.

“No singing,” Cantlebury hissed, huffing along as fast as he could while Matthew and Eliza stumbled along behind. Matthew's arm was heavy on her shoulders, and it was all she could do to stay upright.

“But it's so beautiful,” he protested. “You're so beautiful too. I could recite some poetry to you instead.”

“As long as you do it
quietly
,” said Cantlebury.

“Don't encourage him. Matthew, do you even remember any poetry at the moment?”

“No.”

“There, you see.”

“I was going to make some up. About the hailstorm and the barn. Do you remember the—”

“Vividly. How about a nice poem about flowers instead?”

Cantlebury snickered. “I'd like to hear about the barn, myself.”

“There were no ponies in it, alas,” she told him, hoping to quell his enthusiasm.

“The sky, it falls, like heavy balls,” Matthew began. “Upon the drivers, full of
woe
.”

Eliza groaned. “Dear sweet merciful God in heaven.”

“Nature's fury all unleash'd keeps us from where we want to
go
. This humble barn is all that stands 'twixt us and Gaia's vengeful wrath . . .”

“Ah, invocation of Gaia, nice touch,” Cantlebury quipped. “I'll let Professor McCullough know you haven't forgotten your classics, next time I see him.”

“So, grateful for it we must be . . . though one might wish it had a bath. The end.”

“Bloody brilliant,” was Cantlebury's assessment.

“Very tasteful,” Eliza pronounced it. She was relieved and somewhat astonished that he'd kept it so. And absurdly touched that he'd just extemporized a poem to her.
A very bad poem
, she reminded herself fiercely, to no avail.

“I need to sleep now.”

He nearly managed it, slumping halfway to the ground and almost pulling her down with him. But Eliza pinched him hard, and Cantlebury splashed his face with a handful of the water from the bucket he carried. They'd taken it from the worker Eliza had seen, who was making another slow, shuffling trip to a well outside the wall when they passed by. She hoped the poor man wouldn't be in trouble for losing the bucket. They'd crept up and taken it when he wasn't looking, or more to the point, when he had seemed lost in rapt contemplation of the moon while he paused in pulling up the other full bucket for his yoke. Perhaps, she speculated, he had gone on to sing about it.

 • • • 

C
ANTLEBURY HADN'T LIED
. He really could always tell exactly where he was, and his balloon was still stretched across the poppy field where he'd last seen it. The fields themselves had turned out to be blessedly empty, free of both the stupefied workers and their overseers.

Scrambling in the overturned basket, Cantlebury gathered a few surviving supplies.

“They've ransacked it, I think, and a few things were smashed when I came down. But here's the repair kit, tool box. Oh, my hamper!”

The broken wine bottle inside had not sullied the sausage or cheese that also dwelled in Cantlebury's hamper, and the trio ate ravenously as they trekked the last short distance to the wreck of Matthew's airship. It was unmolested, with Eliza's packed bundle still securely underneath it.

Matthew, unfortunately, was violently ill shortly after they finished the food, his stomach still reacting from the last dose of opium.

“It takes some like that,” Cantlebury said with a philosophical shrug. “At least he can sleep for a bit while we patch this up. Time for some of Lavinia's miraculous goo.”

Eliza found Matthew's discarded flight suit and pillowed his head on it, then set about putting his boiler to rights. A welding torch and proper metal patch would have been better, of course, or even a new boiler. But Cantlebury assured her that a square of tin nipped from the pail, secured with the fiber adhesive substance, would do the job well enough for a few hours. Eliza was impressed by the stuff, which adhered to both silk and metal equally well, and dried almost instantly.

“The trick is to avoid getting it on your fingers. Now, it would hold better still if it had an hour or two to cure, of course. But I say we give it fifteen minutes, then get the hell out of here. If you'll excuse me.”

“I think it was called for. This place is like hell for those poor people. I hate leaving them all behind. And we never looked for Phineas. I feel like we've let down Barnabas and every other person who's lost a loved one to Orm.”

Cantlebury reached for her hand, squeezing it gently. “Eliza, if Phineas were one of those sad creatures, he's gone already. All the parts that made him who he was, at least. I have no idea what's in that special preparation of Orm's, but to the extent I believe in souls at all, I believe that drug has destroyed the souls of these people. The best thing we can do is find a way to get word to the authorities, to make sure that the troops from Salt Lake really do march down here to rout this bastard out. As far as what will happen to the workers after that . . . I'm not sure I want to know.”

“I want to know. I
need
to know. I'm going to do everything I can to get back here and help them. Those quicksilver miners too. Not through speeches or monographs or photos, but by
doing
things. Helping them to get well, to find other work somehow. There will be something I can do, and I will.”

“Strangely, I believe you.”

She chuckled. “Thank you. I'll remember that later on when I'm doubting myself.”

“Let's see if we can rouse the dangerous predator from his nap, shall we?”

“Please forget you heard . . . everything Matthew has said while under the influence of that stuff.”

“No. He's happy. I don't want to forget any of that, I like seeing my friends happy.”

Eliza smiled and walked over to Matthew, shaking his shoulder gently. “Matthew, wake up. Time to go.”

He snored and smacked his lips.

Cantlebury was more direct. He strode over to his friend and aimed a swift kick at the sole of his boot. “Pence. Up.”

“What?” Matthew sat up, swaying and blinking. “I was dreaming about biscuits. Oh, where the bloody hell am I now?”

Eliza coughed gently into her fist, drawing his attention.

“Oh. I thought I'd dreamed you too.”

“No. Can you stand up? It's time for us to go now.”

He stood up, stumbling toward his battered airship. “Cantlebury's going to have to sit in my lap, isn't he? Damn.”

“Could be worse,” his friend said.

“I don't see how.”

A shrill alarm pierced the night, and even at a few miles distance the three could see lights going on all over the castle compound.

“I'll blame you for that later,” Cantlebury said. “Go, go, go.”

Eliza helped them onto the rigging, Matthew urging her all the while to leave them and get herself in the air. She finished strapping them in before stepping into her harness and shrugging on the pack.

“We did fill your boiler, yes?”

“Yes, yes,
go
!”

Thanking Dexter for making her own ship a much simpler affair than Matthew's, she flicked the starter on her spirit lamp as Matthew turned the valve on his helium tank. The two balloons began to billow and fill in tandem, and they cleared the ground just as Eliza spotted the mounted riders pelting along the valley toward them.

Cranking the heat to full and crossing her fingers for luck, Eliza hauled on the rudder control and took a sharp turn west as she twirled up into the cool dark air. A shot flew past her, splitting the night with a singing whistle but somehow missing her.

Matthew's green silks were directly below her, and she could hear the chug of the propeller engine and the roar of his helium tank releasing too quickly as it took him higher.

More shots followed, but they were already out of range. The airships swept up and over the western ridge, crossed a silent valley filled with more poppies, then two more, before finally reaching the far side of Orm's holdings and soaring over the clear, safe ridges in the direction of Carson City.

O
NLY THE DARK
saved them, making it too hard for the sky pirates to track them over the mountains. They kept their airships low, lest the makeshift repairs fail and force them down. When they did land, however, it wasn't the repairs that did it.

“Cantlebury has the plague,” Matthew called to Eliza as she stepped from her harness. They had come down on the outskirts of a small town, and the sun was just rising over the mountains behind them.

“It's not the plague,” their friend said in a pathetically weak voice.

“Might as well be.”

“At least you seem to have recovered,” Eliza said.

Matthew shrugged. “I have a bad head, but I'll survive.”

From the nearest building, an old man emerged, pointing a shotgun at them and approaching slowly.

“I assume I'll survive,” he amended, raising his hands in the air and nodding to Eliza to do the same. “Good morning, sir. Does your town have a doctor?”

“Not for pirates.” The man spit to one side and shifted the tobacco in his mouth with a suspicious air. “Never seen a girl pirate before. Or balloons like those two.”

“We're not pirates, sir,” Eliza explained. “We're part of the Sky and Steam Rally. You've heard of it?”

He nodded slowly, then jerked his head toward Cantlebury, who still reclined against Matthew's basket chair. “What's that one, then? The mascot?”

“Our colleague Mr. Edmund Cantlebury, another of the drivers in the rally. He's been taken ill and can't continue. Please, he needs medical care. We can pay you handsomely.”

Still holding the shotgun at the ready with one hand, the gruff-looking fellow leaned down and placed a hand on Cantlebury's forehead, then felt for the pulse in his neck. Sighing, he gestured to Matthew and handed off the gun. “Hold that. How long ago did he start feeling it?” Taking one knee, he lifted Cantlebury's eyelids one at a time, cursing softly at the lack of light.

“About two hours? It's difficult to say, we were flying in the dark.”

The man frowned and sniffed. “Vomiting?”

“Ah, no,” Matthew said. “That was me. It's a long story. I'm quite well now, however.”

“Rough night?”

“Something like that.”

Eliza stepped forward. “You're the doctor, aren't you?”

He nodded, beard waggling as he smiled and chuckled. “Doctor John Belton. Also the mayor. And right now I guess I'm the sheriff too, since the real sheriff is sleeping off a bender over at the saloon. Your friend's fever needs to come down. Any idea what he's sick with?”

Sharing a quick glance first, Matthew and Eliza nodded in unison.

“It's the influenza,” she confessed. “Several of the racers have been struck. Including Mr. Cantlebury's . . . fiancée.”

The doctor seemed to mull that over. “So you drop down from the sky with no warning, carrying a man with a virulently contagious disease and ask the first person you see to take care of him until you send help? Is that about the size of it?”

“And we'll pay you,” Eliza reminded him.

“Do the racers always fly at night? I thought you all were supposed to land in Carson City yesterday, and be on your way to San Francisco by now. At least that's what the schedule in the San Francisco paper said. We get it a week or so behind here, but we do read it.”

Matthew had already surmised that the doctor was smarter than he looked. Now he was certain of it. He decided to cut to the heart of the matter. “Are you Lord Orm's man?”

The doctor sneered and spit again, a thick brown wad of contempt. “There's a lady present, so I can't say what I'm really thinking, but the short answer is ‘no.'”

“I'm probably thinking the same thing,” Eliza told him. “Orm shot us down and took us prisoner yesterday. We barely escaped with our lives, and I suspect now it's daylight, his pirates will be after us again soon. We
must
get to Carson City. But Mr. Cantlebury will never make it there, and even if he does, the longer he stays with Mr. Pence, the more likely that Mr. Pence will be infected too.”

“You're probably both infected already, this strain just seems to have a long incubation period. You're ticking time bombs,” the doctor told her, but not unkindly. “But you're young and strong, and should pull through a bout of flu all right. Your friend here, I'm not as sure, but he'll live if I have anything to say about it. Help me get him into the house, then you two can be on your way. No offense, but I want you long gone by the time those pirates come looking.”

 • • • 

T
HEY CAUGHT A
tail wind and Eliza had started to believe they might reach Carson City after all, when she tried to adjust her course slightly south a few hours later and her airship didn't respond. She jiggled the control, pulled the lever again, but the ballonet still didn't respond by deflating as it should to send the ship in the desired direction.

She tried a gentle movement to the right, and the craft responded beautifully.

“
Damn
.”

She could hardly make it to Carson City, much less San Francisco, if she had to do a full circle every time she needed to veer left. If nothing else, she simply didn't have the fuel for it.

Eliza's dirigible was slightly ahead of Matthew's and he followed her down to the ground. They landed by a copse of trees, with a charming runoff stream gurgling nearby. They hadn't seen a town or even an isolated cabin in miles.

“Now what?”

“I can't turn left.” She tugged at the balloon as it deflated, flattening it along the ground as best she could, twisting it so the defective ballonet would be spread on top. And there it was, plain as day, a frayed tear in the silk. That bullet from Orm's henchman hadn't missed her after all, but had grazed the ballonet. The pressure must have been tugging at the scrape and widening it ever since, until it finally shredded open at the weakest point.

The tear was long, longer than any of her patches or the scraps left in Cantlebury's kit. Too long for her to sew quickly, and the silk would likely fray again from all the needle holes if she tried to darn an area that large.

After an hour of examining it from every angle, laying out patches in different combinations and considering the small amount of fiber goo remaining, Eliza threw her hands in the air. “That's it, then. It's over. I concede defeat.”

She was fairly certain she'd never spoken those words in her life. They tasted bitter and unwelcome.

“Come and sit down. Have some luncheon. You'll feel better for it.”

“Luncheon?”

Her stomach growled in a manner most indelicate, reminding her she hadn't eaten since the discovery of Cantlebury's hamper last night. Apparently, Matthew and Cantlebury had brought it along.

“We're down to the wine-soaked things now. But everything was wrapped in cheesecloth or linen, so at least we can be sure there's no glass in the packets.”

Wine-infused dried apricots turned out to be surprisingly good. The dried, cured beef strips were not quite as delicious with their impromptu burgundy sauce, but Eliza ate several anyway. Chewing on the tough meat satisfied some craving she didn't know she'd had, the desire to really tear into a meal.

Investigating the stream, they found the water icy and clean, and almost miraculously refreshing.

“You can have the last of the cheese if you like. For some reason I can't stomach the idea of it.”

Eliza considered telling Matthew about some of his less dignified moments of the night before, but decided against it. “I'll save it for later.”

“Very well, suit yourself. Now that we've lunched, and presumably feel better . . . ?”

She nodded happily. There might not be much to celebrate, but food
had
helped. Now they sat under a tree, enjoying the quiet and the cool breeze, and that helped too.

“Right, then. I think you're missing a few obvious possible solutions to your airship problem, Eliza.”

“What solutions? I can't patch it piecemeal. It'll never hold, and I'd be here for days trying to sew it anyway. One big patch would do it, with some stitching and the last of the goo, but I don't see any other way to manage it. I might as well hang my balloon over this branch for a tent right now and send you on your way as soon as it's dark.”

Matthew leaned back against the tree, tilting his head to study the low-hanging branch she'd gestured to. “This would be a decent spot for a tent. But you're missing the point. We
have
silk. A ton of it. Right there.” He pointed at his own airship, with its green balloon folded inside the basket. “Or just take my ship, and let me use your balloon for the tent. Either way, you need to move on to San Francisco.”

If her anger hadn't spent itself on more important things, Eliza knew it would have flared up again. After all this time, after the change she thought she'd seen in the way Matthew viewed her, for him to play the chivalry card now was simply too much to bear.

“We're still competitors, Matthew. The only two left. You may not care, but I do. I don't want to give Orm the satisfaction of stopping the rally entirely. Only one of us can make it to San Francisco, and obviously it should be the one who still has a working vehicle. I won't accept a win based solely on your deciding to be noble.”

“My working vehicle has been carrying an extra payload and is nearly out of fuel and helium,” he explained. “I'm not being noble, just practical. I wouldn't make it to Carson City. Carrying Cantlebury, plus stopping to let him out,and lifting off again, took up any reserves I might have drawn on. But you're only a little over half my weight. You could make it there easily in my ship. Or in your own, if you borrow the silk. You should still have plenty of fuel left. Hot air is more efficient that way, and your
Firebird
is particularly well designed.”

“Thank you. The ballonet placement was my idea. Dexter started with the same design as
Gossamer Wing
, but he'd planned to add to the weight with a more traditional rudder arrangement and smaller directional ballonets. I didn't like it, it felt clunky in the air. So I convinced him I could control the pitch just as well this way.” She nudged at the silk's edge with one booted toe, suddenly shy and awkward as she realized she and Matthew were finally alone together. It wasn't quite the setting she'd imagined.

He stepped closer and slid his toe adjacent to hers, tapping the side of her boot with his own. “I remember. You're very good at that, you know. Taking existing designs, testing them and then improving on them. And you're also clever with fabric. I'm not very good with soft materials. I should lure you from Hardison House and put you to work on my designs.”

He twined his fingers with hers as he spoke, and Eliza returned the pressure. It was as comforting as it was exciting. Just standing on a hillside, alone with a man. With Matthew.

“Lure me? It's not as though I work for Dexter.”

“You're driving his steam car and airship. You field-tested vehicles for him, helped modify his designs. Or at least modify his modifications, as I believe the
Gossamer Wing
was originally conceived by some poor nameless naval researcher in a secret lab somewhere.”

Now he was trying to flatter her. Why wasn't she full of umbrage? “He was nameless then. I think he's Lord Admiral Davis McCollough now.”

“Interesting. So will you consider it?”

“Cannibalizing your balloon?” Was there some other subject she'd missed? It was hard to say. His fingers and flattery were very distracting.

He shook his head. “That too, but I meant coming to work for me. After all this is done, I mean. And after you've helped liberate the opium slaves. Or perhaps you could do that and work for me on an alternating basis. Job by job, as it were.”

She turned to look at him, craning her neck because he stood so close. “You're serious, aren't you?”

“Yes. Quite serious. You wouldn't have to be an employee if you prefer not. A partner, perhaps? A consultant? I don't know, I'd always imagined . . . a partner, I suppose. Somebody to come with me to Europa when I had business there, who would also appreciate the artwork and so forth. Someone to make terrible puns with in the workshop. Just
someone
.”

“And to share your bed?”

He looked up at the branch again. “I've always sort of assumed the
someone
would be my wife, so yes. But as you won't marry me, I suppose I'll have to work scandal management into my business plan.”

“What a foursome we'd be, you and me with Cantlebury and Lavinia. Nobody would have us.”

“We'd have each other.”

Eliza thought back to the day before, in Orm's office, certain she was about to die. That strange peace had come over her, and part of it had been the shredding down of self-delusion to reveal her to herself. She did want to marry Matthew, although she wasn't sure what marriage was. What they could make it. She also knew that regardless of what she'd tried to think, her first reaction to the tale of Cantlebury and Lavinia hadn't been to congratulate them on their willingness to embrace life beyond society's limits. No, her heart had broken for them because they were in love and couldn't marry. Whether she liked it or not, she saw that as the happy ending.