Gossamer Wing Read online

  Something about the way her father said “somebody from the outside” suggested to Charlotte that he had a particular somebody in mind. “What are the various birds, what is the plan and whom might this convenient new colleague be?”

  “Hmm. Yes. Would you care for tea?” He reached for the bell pull before she could answer. “The birds are as follows: the consultation is necessary because a fresh pair of expert eyes might solve some of the lingering technical problems Murcheson’s people have failed to conquer during this past year or more. Our own personnel are not without their talents, but they are only the ordinary sort of geniuses. They create what they are asked to create, quite brilliantly at times, but their vision is somewhat circumscribed. ‘To a man with a hammer, everything is a nail,’ that sort of thing.”

  Camouflage, thought Charlotte. To Hardison, one word had been more effective than a laundry list of specifications. He was not, it was clear, any ordinary sort of genius. “Go on.”

  “A makesmith could also perform any necessary on-the-spot modifications to the airship you might require. Someone from the outside has the added advantage of having no history with the Agency. One or two discreet visits from a social equal, conversations undertaken in private where there is no danger of eavesdroppers. It would be easy enough to approach him without anyone thinking a thing about it. Such a person would have no other record of a connection with our activities. Even if he fell under suspicion, there would simply be nothing for the French to discover, no matter how thoroughly they investigated.”

  “Assuming such a person would agree to work for you, of course. And have the time, means and inclination to leave his business and go haring off to France for weeks or possibly months.”

  “There is that, but that brings us to the plan. You’re the widow of a baronet, and you’ve been quite famously in near seclusion for an unfashionably long mourning. Now, now,” he waved off her protest, “we both know you’ve been far busier with your work than anyone knows, and the seclusion at your estate has made a very convenient cover for your absences during training. The fact remains, you’re still known to people, and if we ship you off to France you will almost certainly be noticed there. You must have a plausible cover. Given the choice of your traveling companion, you must also comport with Whitehall’s antiquated notions of propriety when it comes to female and male agents traveling together.”

  The twist to his mouth told Charlotte everything she needed to know. He hadn’t been able to prevent her taking the assignment to become the first agent piloting a surveillance dirigible, nor had he been able to keep her from volunteering to use that dirigible to recover the lost weapon plans the British so desperately needed now that the French appeared to be gearing up for hostilities again—so he had engineered an obstacle, a challenge, to try to dissuade her. He expected her to cry off when she heard this new condition. He had invoked Whitehall—clever of him to refer to the faceless bureaucracy of the entire administrative wing of government, rather than blaming any individual Charlotte might try to make her case with—but she knew the real objection was his own. She also knew the officials in Philadelphia were far more puritanical than their counterparts in Whitehall. Still, it was a canny move on her father’s part to point the finger of blame all the way across the Atlantic.

  Her father underestimated her resolve. Whatever it was, whatever she must do, Charlotte told herself she would accept it. Though she had never been a rebellious child, she was angry enough at her father’s interference that she knew she would meet this challenge if for no other reason than to prove him wrong. And this mission was not only vital to the Crown, it was vital to Charlotte—a chance to literally follow in her late husband’s footsteps and carry out the objective he’d never been able to complete.

  “Traveling together?”

  “That’s the cover, you see. You and the consultant in question will pose as newlyweds, honeymooning in France.”

  “You want me to . . .” Despite her resolve, her jaw fell open for a moment as she saw the trap her father had led her into. A career was one thing, a reputation quite another, and her father knew as well as anyone how delicate the reputation of a widow could be.

  The gleam of triumph in his eye gave him away. He thought he’d won, and his voice was almost jubilant as he continued. “The difficulty, of course, is that we can hardly faux marry you off to just anyone; it must be somebody plausible. Somebody who might conceivably have known you well enough socially to see you during your isolation and woo you out of your grief. Perhaps someone with whom you have already established a correspondence.”

  Charlotte kept her bitter smile to herself. “Someone . . . titled?”

  Viscount Darmont might look genial and portly and getting on in years, but his amiable round face concealed a mind still sharp as a knife, and he knew his daughter did not tend toward idle speculation. “Indeed.”

  “I see. This is all beginning to sound a good deal more public than I had anticipated. And is this actually to be a faux marriage? Or is the Agency counting on a great deal more loyalty than that from myself and the titled gentleman in question?” She couldn’t imagine that her superiors in either Philadelphia or Whitehall would risk the French discovering that the marriage of two such illustrious Americans was a sham. Not when such a discovery would mean unwanted scrutiny of their motives.

  “You’d be allowed an annulment afterward. In the meantime, your mother would be thrilled. A baroness for a daughter.” If Charlotte hadn’t known him better, she might have missed the hint of smugness in his tone as he waited for her to demur. But she wouldn’t. She couldn’t. Not now. If this was what she must do . . .

  “Goodness, and she had abandoned all hope of my ever marrying my way up in this world.”

  His smile faltered as he waited in vain for her to say more. “Charlotte, you can’t mean to go through with such a scheme. Even for the sake of the Crown, it’s too much to ask. There would have to be an actual wedding. You would have to share quarters on the ship, hotel rooms.”

  “Oh, but I do mean to go through with it, Father. It sounds like an excellent cover story, precisely because it’s so implausible that anyone would go to such lengths. And as you say, we can have it annulled afterward. That will disappoint Mother, naturally, but it can’t be helped.”

  For a long moment they locked gazes, fading steely slate eyes staring down ice-chip blue. Then the Viscount glanced toward the door as one of the upstairs maids opened it to make way for the tea cart automaton. A frippery, but Charlotte knew he ordered it when she was visiting because she had adored it as a child. The brass gleamed as bright now as it had then, a polish no mechanical means could ever accomplish quite as well as human hands wielding a soft rag and a simple compound of diatomaceous earth and naphtha. The gentle metallic clanking as the machine eased to a halt by her armchair was a sweet, soothing moment of auditory nostalgia.

  She poured, but left her own tea cooling in the cup as she waited for her father to speak again.

  “Political marriages are hardly uncommon even in these modern times,” he offered at last, only the taut whiteness about his mouth revealing the extent of his dissatisfaction. “I suppose I shouldn’t be too shocked that you’ve outdone me at my own game. You have grown cold, Charlotte, these past five years. Perhaps pretending to like the French will be easy compared to pretending to be a happy young bride.”

  She ignored the insult. “I will do both, difficult or not. Will you be the one talking to him, then?”

  She didn’t pretend not to know the target of the Agency’s plan. Her father’s plan. It would have insulted them both. She was far too much like her father, Charlotte often thought, for all she was a physical copy of her mother, Lavinia.

  “Yes. With your permission, I’ll visit his workshop tomorrow and speak with him.”

  “My permission?” Her gaze flew around the room, landing on the frescoed ceiling, on the book
shelf, on the tea cart—anywhere but her father’s face. She had no reasonable explanation for the embarrassment she could feel staining her face. “Isn’t this a fine mess? The father asks his daughter’s permission to go propose to a man she’s never met?”

  An interesting man. A man she had corresponded with for years, but with whom she had never truly communicated until that recent brief missive, jotted in a moment of frustration. Not another agent ordered on a mission, someone she could be polite and collegial with, but a person who would have his own unknowable motives for accepting such a dangerous charge from the Crown . . . if he did accept.

  “Would you like to accompany me?” her father asked, as if the thought genuinely hadn’t occurred to him until that moment. Perhaps it hadn’t, as he’d so obviously expected her to reject the mission once the new condition was revealed. He’d been right to expect that. Any sane woman would have rejected it. “Or even go in my stead?”

  “No.” She hoped she didn’t sound as abrupt as she felt. She wished she knew why her heart was racing. Charlotte lifted her teacup to her lips, finally taking a sip. “Tell him that the helmet is perfect.”

  “The new blue thingum with the outlandish eyepiece?”

  She nodded, and then thought a moment before adding, “Remember not to use his title. Apparently he doesn’t like it.”

  * * *

  DEXTER BELIEVED IN serendipity, believed in the importance and necessity of luck in his work. It was key to his sense of humility; he never took a moment of insight or an accidental discovery for granted. He worked hard, he reasoned through problems, he persevered, but sometimes it all came down to a combination of circumstances no one could control.

  At times his delight in the serendipitous was tested, however, and his ability to accept the guiding role of Fate severely strained.

  All Dexter could think of as he listened to Lord Darmont’s proposal with dawning comprehension and disbelief, was that it was a short step from embracing one’s fate to being Fortune’s fool. If he wasn’t careful, Fortune was just as apt to bugger him senseless and leave him for dead as she was to favor him. He wasn’t stupid. He knew what a fickle bitch Fortune could be.

  He wondered if Lady Moncrieffe might be an even worse one.

  “I can’t have understood you correctly, Lord Darmont,” he said after hearing the man through the first time. “I mean to say, I do want to provide any service I can to the Crown and the Commonwealth, and I’ve no great love for the French. If it is within my power to help retrieve these plans and aid your colleagues in whatever it is they’re constructing, naturally I will do what I can to assist. But—”

  “It’s the part where you participate in a not-quite-sham marriage to my daughter that has you stymied, eh?” For a wonder, the man sounded as though he were no more put out about the prospect than he might be about a troublesome argument between two of his tenants, or a horse that hadn’t performed as well as expected at Saratoga. “Can’t say I’m thrilled about it either, but she knows her own mind. She has her mission to perform and her own reasons for going through with it regardless of the additional conditions Whitehall has set.”

  “May I ask about her particular reasons?”

  “I’m sure you may. Whether she answers you is no concern of mine.”

  “I see.” He didn’t quite, but Dexter got the impression Lord Darmont would not take well to being pushed on points he clearly wished to skirt.

  “You made her a hat,” the older gentleman said suddenly.

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Charlotte. You made her a funny sort of hat, for flying with that bubble of hers. She reports that it is perfect. Said she could see the crumbs in my beard from a mile in the sky. And she told me not to use your title, because you wouldn’t like it.”

  Dexter fought an urge to punch at the air in jubilation. He had known, known she would like his modifications.

  “Helmet, sir. It was a helmet. I’m very pleased it met her requirements adequately.”

  The portly Viscount was watching him with eyes that missed nothing. “She was very happy about that funny hat, Hardison. Happier, in fact, than I’ve seen her since her husband died. When you meet with her to discuss all this, as I suspect you will arrange to do as soon as I depart, you could do worse than to ask her about his death. Get it out of the way.”

  “I’ll try to remember. Sir, it’s my understanding that the Treaty of Calais was supposed to bring an end to this sort of activity. Haven’t our agents been recalled from France? And theirs from England?”

  Darmont shrugged. “I didn’t take you for a naïve man, Hardison. Perhaps I was wrong.”

  “We still have spies in France.”

  “Yes,” Darmont confirmed. “We still have spies in France. The French still have spies all over the Commonwealth, including the American Dominions. The old French government, the ousted post-royalist party who never wanted the treaty signed in the first place, have spies among the current French government, the Égalité types. Officially, of course, nobody in any of these governments knows a thing about all that. Nor do I. Officially.”

  “And the treaty?”

  “Did the treaty make you start trusting the French overnight?”

  While Dexter mulled this question over, Darmont stood and wandered over to the rear wall of Dexter’s workroom, to the one frivolous element of design he had allowed himself when converting the room from a parlor to its current purpose. A portion of unplastered stone wall several feet wide was obscured by complex layers of pistons and gears, ranging in size from a few inches to a yard across. The cogs turned, the pistons drove here and there, the whole thing seemed nearly alive with purposeful motion. Its top and bottom workings disappeared into the floor below and ceiling above, suggesting it was clearly only part of some larger mechanism. To keep the dust off, the whole thing was secured under an improbably large pane of heavy glass.

  “This is part of the original house, isn’t it? The room, I mean, not . . . this thing here.”

  “Yes, sir. The first Baron built it shortly after the Colonial Uprising. His was one of the first Dominion titles.” Those titles had secured land for a growing body of restless gentry in Britain, who were happy enough to swear new oaths of fealty to the Crown—and agree to forego the usual seats in the House of Lords, as they wouldn’t be present to vote—in exchange for the prospect of nobility and wealth in the newly subdued American Dominions.

  “I wonder what he would think of this, your ancestor?” Now Darmont was talking about the wall.

  Dexter smiled, feeling much more at his ease discussing this than he had the surreal prospect of marrying Lady Moncrieffe in order to go help her spy on the French in violation of an international treaty. “I suspect he would be amused that I’d left it exposed, but I doubt he would mind. He did build it, after all. Or at least he started the process.”

  He enjoyed the Viscount’s expression; the man was clearly startled. Dexter always enjoyed telling this tale.

  “He was a suspicious old curmudgeon, you see, and after he was widowed at age fifty or so he married again to a much younger woman. She was very beautiful, and he was predictably jealous despite her being, by all accounts, the most virtuous creature ever born and quite in love with the old fool.

  “He couldn’t bear to be apart from her, and she did like to take a solitary ride every fine morning. It preyed on his nerves not to know where she went, but he dreaded the thought that she might catch him spying and think ill of him, or think he didn’t trust her. So he rigged a sort of spyglass on the roof. The stairs were hell on his rheumatism, though, so next he developed a periscope in order to watch her while remaining in his own study.”

  “I think I see the direction this will take,” quipped the Viscount.

  “These things never end well, do they?” Dexter agreed. “From there it became a fixation, and then an obsession. He couldn’t
see past the row of trees after she entered the lane from the south gate, but she would certainly question the removal of such a fine old row of elms. So he put a crude sensor in the gate, that tripped a bell if the gate was opened. The system grew in complexity, and he guarded his study as closely as Bluebeard guarded his wives’ heads.”

  “We all know how that turned out. Can I assume this tale had an unhappy end?”

  “Unhappy, possibly,” Dexter allowed with a smile and a shrug, “but at least not grisly. He did get found out eventually, of course, and she was furious. Nevertheless, she went on to bear him five children that looked too much like him to doubt their parentage, so one can only assume some sort of treaty was arrived at.”

  “Based on the evidence of the children?”

  “And on her journal. She was alternately horrified and flattered by his intensity.”

  “The first Baron Hardison was not a stable chap, I take it.”

  “Mad as a hatter, I suspect. But a dab hand with the gadgetry.” Dexter took a moment to appreciate the wall of delicate machinery in front of him. “Of course his devices were mostly glorified trip wires and the like. Levers to pull at bells, essentially, with a few extra steps in between. But the second and third Barons added their own fillips, most notably the clockworks. All the clocks in the house are synchronized by this system here. It’s still wound from a central location in the kitchens each morning. My grandfather added fans and thermostats. Centralized temperature control. I’ve contributed intrastructural communication devices. And this is a cross-section of the entire system. Remarkable, really.”

  “Your grandfather was the one who married Eliza Chen.”

  “Yes, sir.” He couldn’t help the note of pride that crept into his voice at the mention of his famous grandmother, who’d been a formidable political activist.