Gossamer Wing Read online

  They had obviously gone out of their room but not left the hotel. The place had only two entrances, both of which Martin could see from his vantage point. It was eleven o’clock. They had already dined at the bistro down the street and taken dessert in their suite, but now they had left their rooms again and taken luggage with them. Absconded, clearly, but how? And to where?

  Perhaps they were still in the hotel. Martin had checked thoroughly, and he knew Nancy well. There were no other exits to the building. Only one door at the front courtyard, one side entrance the staff used, not even so much as a door leading to the—

  Words his mother never taught him streamed from Martin’s mouth as he jerked his gaze upward, scanning the roofline for any motion, any sign of activity. He was seconds from deciding that the peaked, pitched roof was not a likely prospect for any human activity, when something caught his eye.

  Or rather, a nothing caught his eye. There was a dark spot, blanking out the stars in a flattened oval. As he watched, the oval rose over the rooftop and diminished against the night sky, a minuscule and fast-dwindling blue flame below it the only clue to its nature.

  Through the spyglass he caught a glimpse, a shadowed shape, for a few heartbeats. He was warming up his radio transmitter even as the shadow vanished from his sight.

  * * *

  THE NIGHT WAS clear, for which Charlotte was grateful. She hated to think what rain might do to the sooty blue dye on the silk of her beloved airship. It was difficult to look at the Gossamer Wing in this tarnished incarnation. She had almost cried to see her beautiful helmet sullied so, but Dexter had promised her a new one soon.

  He had kissed her exactly, exactly like a husband seeing a wife off on a weekend holiday.

  Damn him.

  She couldn’t sustain any resentment, though. He was too kind, his recent forcefulness notwithstanding, and she could hardly deny his appeal at this point. She could, and did, wish she had met him years sooner. If she had, she wouldn’t be here now. It seemed safe enough to accept that, now that it was too late for it to matter.

  The balloon blocked out most of her view of the stars, but Charlotte could still make out enough to appreciate the beauty of the evening. A little too cool, perhaps, but she preferred that to having it be too hot. There was the tiniest sliver of a moon, not enough to give her away on the rooftop. She tried to shake the feeling of being rushed, of things happening more quickly than she could control, and forced herself to relax in the harness. The lights of Nancy dwindled beneath her as she left the smaller city behind and aimed toward Paris.

  Hours later, chilled to the bone and struggling with fatigue, she spotted the grid of much brighter lights that marked her destination. Paris gleamed through the night. It beckoned her like a moth to flame, and she hoped the metaphor didn’t imply similar disastrous consequences for her.

  Sophisticated though the grand old city was, even Paris slept at three in the morning. Charlotte saw only a few passing vehicles in the street below as she lowered her craft to the blessedly flat roof in front of the green dome on the Palais Garnier. She trusted the brilliantly lit gilded statues on the façade to divert the attention of any onlookers from the tiny blue flame and blimp-shaped black spot against the sky.

  The very ease of it made her nervous. She had expected some sort of difficulty to arise by now. For a good two minutes after freeing herself from the harness and tethering the airship, she crouched with a hand on her pistol butt, waiting for somebody to spring at her from some dark corner of the rooftop.

  Nobody sprang, however. Once the slight panic had passed, Charlotte straightened up and headed for the base of the statue of Harmony.

  She glanced around once more to be certain before reaching to the back of the main figure’s robe where the hem nearly reached the pedestal. The gold-painted bronze fell in folds, and Charlotte said a silent prayer as she gripped a particular one of those folds as tightly as possible and pulled down on it with all her might.

  At first there was nothing, no response, and her heart leaped to her throat before she heard a subtle click and felt the piece move under her hand just as Reginald had once described. Bronze squeaked against bronze, but the old mechanism still worked. The piece swung out and down, and she had only to twist it to the horizontal to reveal the little nook in which a switch waited. She flipped it before proceeding along the edge of the roof, counting stones in the low parapet.

  First course, third from the corner, not the discolored brick but the one next to it. She pressed on it hard, twice to the top right corner of the stone, thrice to the lower left, once to the top left . . . and it sprang back against her fingers, swinging open with hardly a whisper. No changed codes, no tricks or traps with the mechanisms. The gears were a bit rusty, but a thick coating of grease had kept them functional.

  And there it was. Small, innocuous, a nearly flat bundle of oiled leather secured with a strap. The buckle was green with slime, the leather mildewed, but other than that it was none the worse for its years in hiding.

  A prickling on the back of her neck made Charlotte wheel around again, scanning the rooftop frantically. Nothing. Still, her heart was thumping again. The fear and the physical exhaustion were starting to overwhelm her. As quickly as she could, she restored the stone and the statue to rights and made sure she’d left no other trace of her visit behind.

  The statue’s brightly illuminated front meant the back was in deep shadow, so Charlotte knelt for a final check of her bearings, trusting that her pocket torch would not be spotted. Then, with her next destination firmly mapped in her mind, she swung her body into the harness, buckled in and released the mooring loop from the vent where she’d hooked it.

  All that worry, and it was so easy in the end, she laughed at herself.

  Her foot kicked off from the roof at the moment the access door slammed open and a dark-clad, stocking-capped man burst through with an evil-looking weapon in his hands. He cursed in a torrent of foul French as he ran toward Charlotte, one hand outstretched, barely missing her toe as she snatched it up into the harness.

  As Charlotte frantically turned the gas higher to gain altitude, she realized the object in the man’s hands wasn’t a weapon. It was a bull cutter. The chain and padlock on the roof access door must have defeated him too.

  Straight up she flew until her ears had chimed at her twice, until she could no longer make out the tiny figure or the roof he stood on. Still she waited for a shot to rip through her from out of the darkness, and she wondered if she would even have time to hear the bang before she fell.

  The shot finally came, a slam of noise that followed over a full second after an impact against her hip sent her swaying in the airship’s harness. Charlotte yelped and cruised higher still, waiting for pain to take the place of shock. It never did.

  Fumbling with one hand, she reached for her hip and realized the bullet had buried itself in the box Dexter had secured to the rigging before she took off. The telegraph transmitter was no doubt ruined, but she herself was unharmed aside from the sharpening ache on her hipbone that presaged a bruise. As the knowledge that she’d escaped sank in, her heart quieted, but her body began to tremble as the massive influx of adrenaline seeped away.

  He’d been . . . stupid. A stupid operative. Martin was in Nancy, he had probably seen her take off and surely notified his men here, yet this man hadn’t managed in all the interim to reach the roof of the Palais Garnier. Who knew how much time he’d wasted attempting to pick his way through that lock, how much longer it had taken him to find the cutters after he’d abandoned the effort?

  He must not be much of a second-story man, she thought, and laughed aloud with a sudden burst of ecstatic wonder at her escape by a hairsbreadth. The operative had waited too long to fire his weapon, and then he’d shot straight up into the night sky. He’d been lucky the bullet hadn’t careened back down to hit him. Charlotte laughed again at the idea of the
fellow standing there, staring up into the darkness, never expecting the bullet that felled him to be one from his own gun. She sobered quickly, however, thinking of how different the outcome might have been, had Coeur de Fer been the man set to catch her on that rooftop . . . or if the incompetent lackey’s bullet had struck a few inches to either side.

  No matter now. It was done. Done, she told herself, trying to generate more of that brief, giddy enthusiasm to sustain her for the last sprint of the night. She would land in the predetermined location on the roof of one of Murcheson’s nearby factory buildings, and if all went according to plan she could review the documents with him on the spot. Perhaps after a meal and a shot of something stiff, for nerves.

  Then she’d have a well-deserved rest, another midnight flight across the French countryside, and she would be back in Dexter’s arms.

  That prospect at last gave her some energy to go on with. Something to strive for. Half an hour later, her first glimpse of the factory’s smokestacks gave her a true second wind as relief flooded through her. She tacked toward the landmark, calculating the distance as less than a mile.

  She was more than close enough to be half-deafened by the blast that came from nowhere and everywhere, to be seared by the wave of heat that flooded the air in the wake of that horrifying sound.

  Not from nowhere, Charlotte realized when her ears stopped ringing enough for her to gather her wits. From the factory . . .

  It burned as she floated closer, unable to grasp what she was seeing. Huge gouts of flame soared into the sky from the ruined smokestack, nearly as high as she flew. She lingered too long, wasting precious fuel and darkness, until she could no longer lie to herself about the source or the cause of the explosion. Factories were dangerous places, but the coincidence of the timing was too great. Murcheson had been compromised, and she could only hope he’d had enough warning to escape the horrific act of sabotage.

  Though Charlotte knew she was too far away to be burned, she trembled anyway to think of it. To think of all the people who might have been trapped in the explosion or the subsequent blaze that was even now beginning to spread to nearby rooftops.

  Tears soaked her helmet lining by the time she turned her tiny craft north and began searching for another place to land and hide for the coming day.

  * * *

  “IT NOT ONLY can be done, it has been done. Not this application, precise, of course,” Arsenault clarified, tapping on the sketch that Dexter had brought along. It showed a round or spherical central object, surrounded by eight slender radiating lines. At the end of each line was a symbol, and at one corner of the sketch was a key indicating that the symbol represented a lamp. “Medicinal? Medical, oui, they use the glass tube to bring the light.” He gestured to his midsection. “Içi, here, inside the body. For the doctors to see when they do the operations.”

  He’d had to do something to occupy his time, and to maintain their cover. So, although Dexter wanted to remain on the roof, scanning the skies until Charlotte returned, he forced himself to attend to the business that had brought him to Nancy, and made an appointment with Arsenault, the man Cormier had recommended. He spent the morning trying not to think of her, trying to think of glass instead, with moderate success.

  Slight language barrier aside, Dexter found he had little trouble communicating with the young French glassmaker. More than once already that morning, he’d found himself silently thanking Cormier for sending him to Arsenault for this project. Even through his concern about Charlotte, he could tell the dynamic young Frenchman understood what he needed and could create whatever the project required, even if Dexter himself wasn’t quite sure what that was.

  “What I’ve pictured, though, involves a much greater distance. Perhaps a mile or even more. And there is also a need for the system to be somewhat sturdy.” At the young man’s blank look, Dexter strained for another word. “Strong? Resistant?”

  “Oui, résistant,” Arsenault said with a smile. “It is not a single glass tube, what you require. Many, together,” he explained, bending to the page and rapidly sketching a cross-section of a bundle of tubes. “Inside a case, comme une saucisse. The only importance is the reflection of the light inside. And that you have not the loss of light over distance.”

  Dexter finally realized the man was comparing the design to a sausage. An external casing, holding all the gathered glass filaments inside and helping the light remain on the desired path without leaking out. “From a light source at one end, all the way to the other, even if the tubes are bent, correct?”

  The young Frenchman nodded, his sandy hair flopping forward into his eyes. He tossed his head impatiently, looking even more like a schoolboy than he already had.

  “And it must also be waterproof,” Dexter said, presenting the final requirement.

  Arsenault blinked a few times and then smiled. “Fresh water or salt water, monsieur?”

  Dexter eyed him warily before answering. “Salt.”

  Suddenly the Frenchman looked nothing like a schoolboy; his eyes were all too knowing, his shrug all too mature. “Just as it is with Monsieur Murcheson. Always the salt water. The flooding, it must be terrible in Le Havre.”

  After another moment, Dexter gave a shrug of his own. “The high cost of maintaining our proximity to England and the shipping routes.”

  “One week,” Arsenault said, tracing Dexter’s sketch with his fingers. “If the distance is as you say, I can deliver your filaments to Le Havre in one week.”

  * * *

  THE NEWS OF the factory explosion had reached Nancy by the midday post. Dexter, sleepless and out of sorts with worry already at the ominous silence of the telegraph receiver, had to read the headline three times before his rough mental translation finally sank in.

  “Charlotte!” he blurted, drawing curious looks from the other patrons in the sidewalk café where he sat over luncheon.

  Flustered, he coughed and pretended to take a sip of coffee while his mind roared in an agony of fear. The grainy photograph of the still-smoking factory stared up at him from the paper on the table.

  She knew something like this would happen. Somehow, she knew, he kept thinking. And he thought of their parting—he so cavalier and straightforward, Charlotte so efficient and brave. He had pretended the danger was negligible, and he would regret that pretense for the rest of his life if anything had happened to her.

  “I should have told her I loved her,” he whispered at his coffee.

  Now she might be gone, burned to ash, as if she’d never been. All he could do was wait for more news. Dexter thought the wait might kill him too.

  Sixteen

  SOMEWHERE IN THE FRENCH COUNTRYSIDE, AND NANCY, FRANCE

  WET. SLIMY.

  A slithery touch and the sharp smell of cut grass directly under her nose woke Charlotte from her fitful slumber. She opened her eyes and nearly screamed at the monster she saw before her, until her eyes and brain sorted themselves out and she realized it was only a cow.

  It had seemed like a monster in part because she was viewing it upside-down, as she was lying on her back in an empty hay wagon and her head was slipping off the open end onto the sloping tailgate. And in part because it was very, very close; the cow had evidently mistaken Charlotte’s sweaty, unwashed face for a salt lick.

  In one swift move, Charlotte swung away from the cow and into a crouch on the bed of the wagon, scuttling backward to put even more distance between herself and the bovine creature.

  The cow, unperturbed, began sampling the tufts of hay caught between the rough planks of the wagon’s side. Satisfied the beast meant her no harm, Charlotte looked around to assess her situation, wiping her horribly moist face on her sleeve as she did so. The assessment didn’t take long.

  She was in a field somewhere outside Paris, there were no nearby farm buildings, and a gently persistent reddish-brown cow was eyeing her with what Charlotte
could only read as curiosity. When it lowed at her, she shushed it automatically.

  From what she could see it was very early morning, as the sun was up but dew still dampened the shorn, trodden timothy grass of the field. The chronometer from the Gossamer Wing’s instrument panel confirmed this. Ravenous, aching from her flight and the few hours’ dubious rest in the wagon, Charlotte pondered what to do next.

  “Can’t walk to the nearest town, can I, Bossie? Are French cows called Bossie? I’m hardly dressed for visiting a country village, but I don’t think I can go a full day without eating either.” She tipped her head to examine the cow’s belly. “Hmm. I don’t think I’m quite desperate enough to try my hand at milking a cow, however.”

  Bossie mooed again, and Charlotte heard a late-rising rooster crow as if in response. It was time for her to find cover, food or no food. With a last regretful look at the cow’s udders, Charlotte tucked the leather harness of the Gossamer Wing under one arm, stuffed the voluminous midnight blue folds of the balloon under the other, and took firm hold of the gas rigging to keep it upright as she leaped from the wagon and started toward the nearest stand of trees.

  * * *

  THAT DAY, CHARLOTTE added theft to her list of dubious accomplishments.

  It’s only sort-of theft, she reassured herself as she wiped the black kohl from her face and neck with the clean cloth and butter she’d found in the farmhouse.

  She’d left enough coin to pay for the cloth, butter and sprigged pale blue cotton dress many times over, right there on the table in the kitchen. Surely the farmer’s wife wouldn’t bemoan the missing items too long.

  “I could hardly have walked up and asked somebody to sell me the things,” Charlotte explained to Bossie, who had turned up at the side of the stream in the wood adjacent the hay field. “I was dressed like a cat burglar, after all.”