Magnificent Devices [5] A Lady of Resources (14 page)

The roses smelled beautiful, though, and as she made her way around the Queen’s Tower, she found herself descending into the moat. Here was clearly where the cut flowers for the table arrangements had come from. The air was heavy with scent and the somnolent buzzing of bees. Butterflies wavered from rose to lily to lavender, with no particular destination in mind, much like herself.

At the second tower, she climbed the slope, wondering if there was a kitchen garden on the fourth side of the castle, and if so, if there might be chickens. She missed the company of the hens. Perhaps if there were none, Father would let her bring some home, and she could have her own flock here, as Lewis and Granny Protheroe did at Wilton Crescent, and the Lady did wherever she happened to be.

“I say, make up your mind. Are you coming or going?”

Lizzie looked past the drapery of honeysuckle and ivy growing on the tower wall to see Evan Douglas standing on the flagged step of what she supposed must have been the old postern gate, back when these towers were meant to defend actual occupants, not merely the bastions of science.

“Neither,” she replied, his bluntness freeing her rather neatly from the constraints of civility. “I’m exploring.”

“One usually has a destination in mind for that.”

“If one did, it would be called
traveling
, not
exploring
.”

His lips twitched. “Point to you. I thought you’d gone to Newquay or Cowes or wherever it was that lot were off to.”

So he did listen to the dinner conversation, even if he hardly ever participated. “No, I’m to act as hostess this evening, when the scientists come, remember?” Perhaps he would be different tonight, with his own kind at the table.

“I do now. You’re to be our sole civilizing influence, then, I take it.”

“I shall at least endeavor to keep you from smoking in the dining-room.”

“Good luck there. You’ll be lucky if they use their napkins—to say nothing of spoons.”

The image made her laugh. “Come now. It can’t be that bad.
You
seem fairly civilized.”

“That’s only because I have to sing for my supper and be on my best behavior.”

“Sing for your supper? Do you mean with your experiments?”

He kicked a stone away and sat on the step, his hands dangling between his knees, heedless of the fact that the back of his white laboratory coat would be dusty when he got up. “Yes, that is what I mean,” he said, gazing moodily down into the moat. “Cousin Charles is sponsoring me to conduct the research, but that means that when there is something to write up, he gets the credit, not I.”

“Has there been something to write up?” Lizzie sat on a mossy rock close by, wondering if it had fallen from the tower a century or two ago—or perhaps been dropped upon an invader’s head.

“A small monograph on the two images I’ve managed to capture. The Royal Academy of Technology and Science was not impressed. I did not make it into the monthly journal—not even in the Notes in the back.”

“But you will, in time,” she said, trying to encourage him. “If effort and application lead to success, then of course you will. You must be patient.”

He turned his gaze upon her. His eyes were the blue of the bachelor buttons that grew on the roadsides, and his brows were strongly marked under the riot of curls falling onto his forehead. “What an odd field genetics is,” he said, apropos of nothing.

“I find it rather fascinating,” she said at once, feeling quite chuffed that here was a subject about which she knew a little. “At Gwynn Place, in Cornwall, where we’ve spent the last few summers, Polgarth the poultryman is breeding a special strain of chicken—they’re calling it the Carrick Orpington. Maggie and I were able to assist him using what we had learned of the subject at school.”

She realized with a sinking feeling that this would be the first year since they had met the Lady that they had not gone down to the St. Ives estate for the summer. No wonder things felt so out of joint.

“I’m glad to hear it. Perhaps you can explain, then, how Charles managed to produce a daughter like you and a flibbertigibbet like Claude.”

“We do have different mothers,” she reminded him, unsure of whether or not to be pleased. It might not, after all, be a compliment. Nor was it exactly the kind of polite conversation a gentleman might have with a young lady.

But no one was listening, were they?

“There is that.”

“And nurture, you know, has as much to do with how someone turns out as nature. Claude would likely be an entirely different person if he had spent five years on the streets of Whitechapel, scrabbling and thieving and trying to stay alive.”

“Is that how it was for you?” She had his entire attention now. “Margaret was not merely playacting?”

“Worse. I do not like to dwell upon it.”

“So your memories and dreams, then … they might be particularly vivid, given the material upon which they cogitate?”

“Sometimes they are.” Sometimes she woke, screaming, with the snarling faces of Billy and Albert and the other members of the Billingsgate gang hanging over her, their hands scrabbling at her skirts, and in the dream, no help or hope in sight. In reality, she owed quite a lot to Snouts and Jake.

She shook the ugly images from her mind. Her dreams since returning from Bavaria were much stranger—water, falling, that silly children’s tune perpetually in the background—but no less frightening.

“Would it be an imposition if I asked you to help me?” His gaze had not moved from her face. A gentleman would have looked elsewhere to give her time to compose herself. But Claude and the others had already established that the young scientist was not a gentleman.

“How?” she asked. “Are you going to put me in your machine and extract my memories? Are you quite prepared for what you might find, Evan Douglas?”

“I am never prepared for the endless puzzle that is the human brain,” he said slowly. “But if you are willing, I should like it very much if you would consent to be a subject. It does not hurt … and I am afraid I have rather run out of people able to help me. Geoffrey said he might, but he is halfway to Exeter by now.”

From here, she could not see the front of the castle, the gardens, or even the broadmead from which the airships had lifted. She had nothing to do but tidy the room she had shared with Maggie, no one to talk to except her father, and he likely had estate business to take care of in between rafts of guests.

No one needed her except this disheveled young man, who at least spoke to her as though she had a brain in her head, though his delivery could use a little refinement.

“All right,” she said. “Why ever not?”

Filled with curiosity, Lizzie followed him into the tower. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust from the bright summer day to the enormous, dim interior, which was illuminated by electricks strung along the stone walls about ten feet from the floor, and further up, by the arrow slits where archers might have fired during a siege. The floor the archers stood upon, however, had been knocked out to accommodate the size of the scientific equipment.

“Shall I explain what you are looking at?” Evan asked.

“I presume that enormous thing is the mnemosomniograph. Goodness, what a mouthful. It is almost as long as that machine is tall. May I simply call it the
dream device
and be done?”

Again, he almost smiled. “A reasonable plan. So, before you is the table upon which the subject—you, for instance—would repose, either in a state of meditation or sleep.”

She tilted her head back in an attempt to see where the coiling cables went into the body of that enormous glass globe suspended above their heads. “I would not be able to sleep with that above me, I am quite sure.”

“I could read my baccalaureate thesis to you, if you like.”

She laughed in sudden delight. If only Arabella could see him now. “And they said you had no sense of humor.”

“Just because one possesses different qualities does not mean one is devoid of them.”

“Of course not. I am pleased to make the discovery. We shall get on swimmingly now.”

“I thought we were getting on already. You have not made a single disparaging remark and it has been all of ten minutes.”

“Oh, I am sorry. You must have me confused with Arabella. One blond girl is very much like another, I suppose.”

“I could hardly find two more different. And you are not really blond, you know. Your hair is more a honey color.”

Goodness. At this rate he would begin reciting poetry.

“So this is the table, and those are the cables. Why is that glass globe suspended up there? I won’t even ask how you got it up there—one could fit a piano inside it.”

“We built it inside the tower. That is an aggregation chamber, based in part on the Malvern-Terwilliger Kinetick Carbonator. One needs a lot of power to create the equivalent of a flash charge on a camera. And since floor space in towers is limited, we have spread vertically rather than horizontally.”

“I see. And those massive flumes?”

“They speed the particles of light to the substrate upon which the subject’s memories or dreams are recorded.” He walked behind a screen and came back with a square plate rather like the ones that slipped into the backs of cameras in a photography studio. “These contain the chemical substrates. Eventually, my technology will progress to the point where a continuous series of small plates can be made as the dream progresses, and then illuminated one after the other to replicate the dream exactly as the sleeper experienced it.”

“Fascinating. But if you do not mind my asking, what is the point of all this? Why capture people’s dreams and memories at all?”

He laid the plate upon the table. On the other end of the table sat a heavy metal helmet—goodness, is that what one wore while attempting to sleep? That would make it even more impossible, unless there were a pillow concealed inside.

“Because the conscious mind can be most unreliable. Imagine Sir Robert Peel’s policing force, for example. Five different witnesses to a murder could give five different accounts of the perpetrator. But if their dreams and memories were freed of the conscious mind’s tendency to edit and preserve itself, the police might obtain a more reliable image of the murderer—and they would have a better chance of catching him.”

“I see,” she said slowly. “Is that the only use for it? Is Father sponsoring these experiments solely for the public good?”

He smiled and touched the helmet, which bristled with wires and cables and a long hose that ran into the body of the larger device. “Many of our country’s advancements began as a way to accomplish one thing important to one individual. It is not until later that one sees how it may benefit many.”

“And what does Father want to accomplish?”

“He wishes to preserve as many memories of those he loves—or has loved—as possible. Apparently Cousin Claude remembers very little of his own mother. Nor, I imagine, do you remember much of yours. Or am I mistaken?”

She gazed at him, marveling anew at the things she was learning about her father, who had been a stranger only a few short weeks ago. “No. You are not mistaken.”

“He possesses no images of Claude’s mother. That is why he went to the trouble of having your own mother’s portrait painted. But once this device becomes fully able to do what he envisions for it, he will submit himself upon the table and hope that I can harvest some images to give to Claude.”

Lizzie found her throat closing with emotion, and it was a moment before she could speak. “I should very much like to assist you, then, Evan. I should like to help make that a reality for both my father and my half-brother.”

He gazed across the table at her, and a long dimple creased his cheek. “I am glad, and your father will be, too.”

“Shall we begin now?”

His dismay as he perceived that she was serious was almost comical. “Oh no, no. It takes a day to prepare the device for a subject, and with the crowd coming this evening I cannot even begin. I am to present a paper on it after dinner, and I must finish a few final notes.”

“Tomorrow, then?”

“They will tour this tower tomorrow morning, and return to London in the afternoon. But if I work part of the night, I could have everything ready by the next day.”

“How can I assist you?”

He reared back as though retreating from her in sheer incredulity. “Assist me? I think not.”

“I do not see why you should say that. My sister—cousin—and I made a walking coop with hydraulic legs, powered by the lightning cell invented by Dr. Rosemary Craig, when we were ten. I am quite capable of lending my lily-white hands to this effort should you need them.”

“Rosemary Craig.” His voice was hushed, the way some people spoke of Her Majesty—or God. “One of the greatest minds of our time.”

“I am glad you agree. I shall tell her you said so, the next time I write.”

Oh, she’d done it now. He goggled at her in such surprise he could not speak for a full thirty seconds. “You—you know Doctor Craig? Personally?”

“Yes, of course. She assisted us with the walking coop. That was before she set out on her travels, and long before she took up residence in Edmonton, of course.”

She had quite winded him now. “I must say, Cousin Elizabeth, that you astound me on a regular basis.”

“For goodness sake, if we are to be related, you must call me Lizzie.” She tried to roll the dream helmet up to get a look inside it, but the bolts on the outside prevented it. “You should come out of your tower more. Clearly your sphere of experience is in need of expansion, if you judge me by so low a standard.”

“I have not judged you at all, except to observe that you have rather a livelier mind than most, with fewer plates of metaphorical glass between it and the rest of the world.”

What an odd way he had of saying things that she was not entirely sure were complimentary. She gave up on the helmet and wandered around the edges of the equipment.

“I should be honored to be mentioned in the smallest capacity to Doctor Craig,” Evan said, returning to the subject at hand. “I will not presume so far as to speak of my great admiration for her achievements, but perhaps you might present my humble compliments in your next letter.”

“I shall indeed. I was going to write letters this afternoon, in fact.”

“Oh, don’t go yet.”

She had no intention of going yet. “I do not see the telescope. Where is it?” She looked behind the equipment, and then up at the glass globe.

“It is not in here, but up on the top floor—the parapet, I suppose you would call it. But no one is permitted up there except your father.”

“And you, I presume.”

“No, not even me.”

“But we are family. Surely that restriction applies to the staff and guests, not to us.”

She was quite certain he snorted, but since he had gone behind the screen to replace the plates, she could not be sure. “It certainly does apply to family—can you imagine the result if Claude decided to fiddle with the second most powerful telescope in England?”

Look—here was the base of a stone stair that wound up the walls of the tower in a steep spiral. She began to climb.

He came out from behind the screen and saw her. “Miss—Lizzie, no! What are you doing?”

“I am quite sure that particular rule does not apply to either of us,” she called down. “I am going to see the telescope so that I may converse intelligently with our guests if the subject should come up this evening. And so should you.”

“Lizzie!” His boots scraped on the stone steps as he began to climb after her. “I beg of you, come down.” When she ignored him, he climbed faster, his steps falling in a syncopated rhythm with hers. “Botheration, girl. Do be careful. There is no railing because I do not want any extraneous metal objects in here that could wreak havoc with the conductivity of the current. If you fall, the damage will be permanent.”

“I have no intention of falling.” To someone who had grown up on the dockside catwalks, to say nothing of
Athena
’s rigging, climbing a set of stairs fixed into a stone wall that hadn’t moved in a thousand years was child’s play. Or so she told herself. Up and up they climbed, until she reached the point where she could look down no longer, and focused on the curving radius of each step. Not for worlds would she admit to him her fear of heights, which had not begun to affect her until she’d come level with the great glass globe. No matter. She had started this, and she would finish it.

At the very top, the steps ran up into the ceiling, but with half a dozen to go, she saw a lever set into the wall, obviously to open the door. She pulled it down and with a smooth clicking of gears in good working order, the floor above retracted into a deep slot in the ceiling, leaving an opening like that of a trap door.

She stepped through, into the breezy sunlight.

Lizzie could not bring herself to look over the parapet at the ground some two hundred feet below. But even if she’d had no fear at all, her astounded gaze would have been drawn to the huge barrel of the telescope protruding from the brass dome built on top of the tower.

Evan emerged from the trap door and lifted his face to the sky as though he had not seen it in some time. Then he crossed to the parapet and gazed out at the Cotswold hills, with copses of trees folded lovingly into their valleys, and a village not far off with stone cottages, thatched roofs, and a church spire. All of which she could see quite comfortably from the base of the telescope, thank you. There was no need to join him at the embrasure.

The breeze snatched at her skirts and tossed them flat against her legs. Before it threw her hair over her face, she pulled open the door—which was not locked—and let herself into the dome.

The apparatus that governed the telescope’s angle and direction of sight was equally huge. It looked like a cross between a gyroscope and the insides of an exceedingly large watch. Extending out of the complicated array of gears for turning and aiming it was the brass barrel, the tip of which was visible from the outside through a slot in the dome’s roof.

“We are going to be in so much trouble if we are discovered.” Evan closed the door and gazed up in awe. “Great Caesar’s ghost. Look at the size of it.”

“Why do you suppose Father has forbidden it to anyone?” She mounted the steps to what she could only call the pilot’s chair, and seated herself on the leather seat. The ocular assembly was too tall for her, as though a man usually sat here, so she gave it a tug. On well-oiled and silent bearings, the assembly lowered itself to her eye level, bobbing slightly, and she looked through it.

Nothing.

How very strange. “I can’t see anything.”

“Of course not. There are no stars or planets visible at nearly noon.”

As if she did not know that. “I should be able to see sky, at least,” she said impatiently. “But it is all black. Does it require electricks in order to operate?”

“If you move and allow me to sit there, I will tell you. And if we are discovered, it is much better that I should take the blame than you.”

She descended the steps and traded places with him. “Why should you do that? We are in this together, it seems to me.”

Settling himself into the seat, he said, “Because firstly, I am the elder, and secondly, Charles tasked me with the responsibility to see that no one comes up, given that I am here most of the time. So you are safe.”

He applied his eye to the viewing assembly. Frowned. Raised his head and gazed at the controls as if they were an equation that could be solved with sufficient concentration.

“I told you.” Lizzie tried not to sound smug, without success.

“There are no electricks up here, so it cannot require power. The engine powers the directional assembly only, it seems. The telescope itself is separated from it, and it appears the vertical aim is accomplished with this hand crank. So why …?”

“Perhaps there is a cap on the end of it.”

“Perhaps you are right. We may be required to remove it—but for now, I suggest we remove ourselves. Come, Lizzie. We need to go down.”

“Just check,” she begged. “Have a look outside while I lower it. I should love to see the village, at least, if I cannot see the stars, and this may well be my only chance. Please?”

“Very well,” he said after some mental struggle. “But only for a moment. If Charles should happen outside and see that the barrel has been moved there will be hell to pay.”

Once the door closed behind him, Lizzie lowered the telescope’s barrel using the hand crank, which made the gears and wheels within the gyroscope circle and adjust. Her hands fell naturally onto two levers somewhat similar to the driving bar in the Lady’s steam landau. What were these for?

Gently, her lower lip between her teeth, she moved the lever just an inch toward the barrel.