Claire huddled in the crawl space with the children, thankful for one very small mercy—that the sounds of the search in the distance masked the sniffles of misery close by.
“I can’t believe it of ’im,” whispered Maggie, her voice clogged with tears. “Our Jake.”
“’E ent our Jake no more.” Lizzie’s voice might have been barely audible, but her rage came through loud and clear. “It’s every man for ’imself wi’ that one, an’ no mistake.”
“Shhh.” Claire sat up. “They’re coming back.”
“How many rooms does one nob need?” growled a voice directly below them—right outside her room, in fact. “Looks like she spent each night of the voyage in a different cabin.”
“Who knows ’ow nobs fink,” Jake said. “Wot’re we gonna tell the captain?”
“I’m gonna tell him she ain’t here. And then you’re gonna take whatever he dishes out, and hope it’s not that long walk.”
“But it ent my fault she scarpered.”
Claire couldn’t help it—Jake sounded so young and frightened that she could almost pity him.
Almost.
“It’s your fault you didn’t find out where she was first and save us all a bunch of time. Me, I’d send that pigeon pronto and get the Dunsmuir relatives coughing up the ransom. But the captain, he’s a businessman. He’s got other plans, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll find that girl before you go back in there.”
Other plans? For her? Claire’s stomach did a dip and twist that had nothing to do with air currents.
But maddeningly, the pirates said nothing more, just hotfooted it out of the guest quarters, presumably to widen the search.
“I don’t understand,” Maggie whispered. “Why did he say you were sleeping in all those rooms?”
“Easy, silly billy,” Lizzie said. “Jake squealed on the Lady cos she’s worth something. But we ent. ’E’s keepin’ mum about us, for all the good it’ll do us or him. We can’t creep about up ’ere forever. They’ll find us when we fall out of the ceiling from hunger.”
“Then we must make them call off the search,” Claire said with dawning realization. “If they don’t know you’re here, and they’re not looking for you, maybe you can help us.”
“Fine by me.” Claire couldn’t see her in the dark, but she could tell by the grimness in the girl’s tone that she was already planning to start her help with Jake. “How you gonna get ’em to call it off?”
“By surrendering myself.”
Maggie sucked in a breath, and behind her, a whimper escaped Willie’s throat. “Lady, you mustn’t. We’re a flock. We gots to stick together.”
“It’s the only way. The sooner they stop looking, the safer you and Willie and Tigg will be. And you will not starve up here. I’ll find a way to get food to you, and if that fails, there is always thievery.”
Dear me. If mama could only hear me now.
“I’ll leave you the rifle,” she went on. “If you’re cornered, you must have a way to defend yourselves.”
“Can’t, Lady, beggin’ yer pardon.”
“Why not, Lizzie? I can’t leave you with nothing.”
“We ent defenseless.”
Claire was reminded again of how much she did not know about the twins’ early years on the streets. How much, perhaps, she did not want to know.
“But Jake knows you got that gun, and he knows you always give it to yer second. If it don’t show up wiv you, he’ll make ’em keep up the search.”
“Her second would’ve been him if he weren’t such a blackguard.”
Lizzie paused a second to acknowledge her twin’s brokenhearted bitterness. “After ’im, it’s Tigg. You got to take it or they’ll hunt him sure. It’s ’obson’s choice, Lady, but you got to make it.”
Claire swallowed the obstruction in her throat. “You will on no account allow yourselves to be captured,” she said, her voice husky.
“No, Lady.”
“You will protect Willie and Rosie at all costs. They are the least able to defend themselves.”
“Yes, Lady.”
“And if the opportunity arises to save them at the expense of the Dunsmuirs or me, you will take it as though it were an order.”
A pause.
“Lizzie?”
“Yes, Lady,” Lizzie said at last. “But it best not come to that.”
Claire took this in the spirit in which it was meant. “I hope not. As Maggie says, we are a flock and I do not mean that we should be separated.” She took a breath and willed herself not to cry. Then she took off the St. Ives pearls and wound them about Maggie’s neck, under her voile blouse. The raja’s emerald went on Lizzie’s thumb by feel in the dark, and she replaced the sharpened ivory hair stick in her chignon. “Now, then. Let us move the panel. On three.”
She slipped through the opening and dropped lightly to the Turkish carpet. Then she shook out her skirts, lifted her chin, and ... paused for a moment as an idea struck with the suddenness of lightning.
Their hiding place had been just outside her cabin door. Through the porthole, she could see the pirate airship, riding easily next to them. Piled-up clouds formed a backdrop, and somewhere the sun was coming up, outlining them in a lurid glow of orange and red. Lightning flickered in their depths, and in the distance, thunder cracked. Not as close as it had been, but close enough to make her nerves jump.
The invaders did not yet know her location. She would give herself up, yes, but before she did, what damage could she inflict?
She opened the porthole and clutched its lower rim as she gazed out, cataloguing the parts of the ship and calculating distances.
The rightmost of the twin fuselages bumped gently against their own, which put the hanging gondola not thirty yards off. Most of the crew must be on the Lady Lucy, because the ladders and ropes had emptied, and men moved to and fro behind the glass of the gondola. Engineers, likely, and mechanics, though they were a motley lot with hardly a whole uniform among them.
Instead of engine cars flanking the fuselage, as on the Lady Lucy, though, this ship appeared to have some kind of external propelling assembly cobbled to the back of the gondola.
Inefficient. Ugly. A true engineer’s nightmare, and quite likely the very devil to repair while under way.
Marvelous.
Claire unholstered the rifle with the ease of long familiarity and pushed the engagement lever forward.
It began to hum.
She did not have much time before someone decided that her disappearance was quite impossible and came back for a third search. At the moment when the rifle’s pitch reached a working range, she hefted it onto the rim of the porthole and took careful aim.
A ragged beam of blue-white energy sizzled out of the barrel and arced across the space between the two ships. It hit the propeller assembly like a splash of wine in a man’s face, and busy tendrils of light flickered over every surface, exploring and sizzling and frying every possible working component to a blackened mass.
Claire permitted herself a smile of satisfaction. It looked for all the world as though the pirate ship had been struck by lightning.
She pulled the rifle in. They would take it from her. But that didn’t mean they could use it to threaten her or hers.
With quick fingers, she found a tiny brass coupling that formed part of the trigger assembly. Its removal would not be noticed unless the rifle were disassembled completely and the mechanic counted five instead of six. But neither would the rifle work without it.
She threaded the ivory hair stick through it and inserted it into her chignon.
Now then.
All she had to do was stay on the working ship. If they planned to take the Lady Lucy for salvage or sale, they would not harm it. In the wildly unlikely event that the Dunsmuirs and their crew could reclaim their vessel, their chances at an escape were marginally better now.
She hoped.
Her blue hat was not the best accessory for her raiding rig, but it made her look taller and gave her confidence. She collected it off the floor, punched the dents out of it with her fingers, put it on, and sallied forth to the dining saloon as though she had been invited to lunch.
All the food that had been on the sideboard had been commandeered to the family table. Behind a full plate lounged the largest man she had ever seen, with a wild mane of black hair. But it was not his size that made her steps falter.
It was the device set into his eye socket. As she advanced toward him and his table full of cronies, all eating and arguing and laughing at once, it swiveled toward her like a telescope, adjusting itself in and out until apparently it found a satisfactory focus.
And then as he raised a glass of the earl’s good Madeira to his lips, she saw his left arm. It was mechanical also, a wonder of cogs and gears and pistons, each moving in smooth concert. Good heavens. The Texicans possessed technology the likes of which they had not even seen in London. What were they doing, masquerading as bumpkins and followers when they could be cornering the market on automatons?
“And what do we have here?”
She stopped, planting her feet as two miscreants leaped up and grabbed her arms as if she planned to escape, not come forward.
“If you don’t mind,” she snapped. “I am clearly not running away.”
“This would be her,” one of her captors said helpfully. “That girl you was looking for.”
For answer, the mechanical arm flashed and the man on her right screeched as an apple bounced off his forehead. “I can see that myself, you dolt.”
Hm. A little sensitive on the subject of his eyesight, was he? She made note, as well, of the accuracy of his mechanics.
“Do I have the pleasure of addressing Lady Claire Trevelyan?” he drawled.
There was nothing wrong with his mind, either. “You do,” she replied. “But you have the advantage of me, sir.”
“I do, at that.” He grinned, and the men at the table laughed.
She waited, the very picture of icy dignity, and the laughter trickled off into grunts and grumbles as they returned to their food.
“Oh, let her go.” He waved an irritated hand at the two men on either side, and reluctantly, they unhanded her. “I’m Ned Mose, captain of the Stalwart Lass, and I claim this vessel. And its occupants.”
“By what right?”
“By right of arms, you little minx, and I’d watch my tone if I were you.”
“Were you me, you would need a larger corset.”
His nonmechanical eye bulged, and then he let out a bark of laughter. This time, the men shifted their feet and looked at one another, as if they hadn’t gotten the joke and weren’t sure whether to laugh anyway.
“There’s nothing wrong with your tongue, at any rate. Where have you been hiding?”
“There are spare blankets in the cupboard in my room. I concealed myself behind them.”
Without warning, he reached over and cuffed the man next to him. “Remember that next time, you idiot, so you don’t spend an hour searching for a prisoner who isn’t there.”
“But—but—”
The man was perfectly justified in his confusion, since even Rosie would have difficulty concealing herself in that cupboard. But no one was listening.
One of her former captors yanked the lightning rifle out of its holster and tossed it in the captain’s direction before she could pretend to protest. His hand ratcheted out at least an additional arm’s length and snatched it out of midair, then the assembly clanked as it retracted to normal length again. “What’s this? Some kind of gun?”
He examined it, and the hairs on the back of Claire’s neck stood at attention as the telescopic eye swiveled to and fro. It was most unnerving. She had never been one to play with dolls as a child—any creation, in fact, that looked human but was not. She loathed the automatons that some families used as butlers. As a child, china faces of dolls with eyes that blinked had made her scream and run in the other direction … and here was a face with practically the same effect.
But Ned Mose was human. Merely a man, and possessed of the same qualities all men possessed, including a sense of humor. She must remember that when the blank gaze of the telescopic eye passed over her once again.
“I asked you a question.”
She collected herself. “Yes, it’s a gun. But it no longer works. I don’t know why.”
If she had removed the power cell, Jake would have told them at once. But even he would be slowed down if he tried to repair the gun. The coupling was not the most obvious cause of its failure—in fact, it would charge perfectly well now that the captain had flicked the engagement lever forward.
The trigger would simply not release the charge.
And until this moment, she had never had reason to wonder what would happen if the charge was not released.
“I would not do that if I were you,” she said pleasantly. “You might disengage the lever again.”
“I might if I felt like listening to a slip of a girl.” He heaved himself to his feet, brought the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed straight at her. “Enough conversation. You’re coming with me.”
If ever her life had depended on her own work, it was now. Stricken motionless, she gazed into the bell of the barrel, half expecting a bolt to sizzle out of it and fry her where she stood.
But it did not.
The captain waggled the trigger. Hefted the gun. Shook it. Pulled the trigger again while looking directly into the flared barrel.
Goodness. Here was something to know. In moments of frustration, logic forsook him. She might take it upon herself to engineer several more such moments, in hopes that she might find an advantage.
With a growl of frustration, he flung the gun at someone. “Fix that.” The mechanical hand clamped her arm and she winced with pain. “You. Come with me.”
He marched her down to the B deck and from thence into the gondola.
“Claire! Oh, thank God!” The countess flung herself across the bridge at the same time as the captain released her with a shove that told her just how much power that arm possessed. They crashed into each other in the middle of the deck, and Claire hugged Davina hard.
“Davina. John. I’m so glad you are all right.”
“For now,” the captain growled. “Long as I get what I want, I don’t see the need for killing. But cross me and you won’t get a second chance.”
“You cannot kill an earl,” Captain Hollys said stiffly. Blood had crusted in front of his ear and down the side of his neck, and one uniform sleeve was torn nearly off. A large bruise was forming on his right cheekbone. “You would be hunted from one end of the Empire to the other.”
“Lucky job we ain’t in the Empire, then, bucko.” The arm ratcheted out and took a careless swipe at Hollys’s head. He staggered back, but a fresh trickle welled on his cheek. “You’re in the Texican Territory air space now, and nobody here cares if you’re an earl or a girl, except if you’ve got money. And both earl and girl here do, if my information’s right.”
“You intend to ransom us?” John Dunsmuir asked, moving so that he stood between the pirate and Claire and the countess.
“Be pretty stupid of me not to, considering you’re rich as Croesus.” The telescopic eye looked him up and down, its assembly whining. “Everyone knows who you are, yer lordship. Be a fine feather in my hat to line my nest with.”
Claire forebore to remark on this distressing mix of metaphors. The point was clear enough. And since he appeared unaware that the couple had a child, maybe he didn’t know as much as he thought he did. Thank heaven for small mercies.
“My family does not negotiate with pirates.”
“They’ll negotiate for you. But I might be convinced to lower my asking price if your missus here will hand over the family hairlooms. I hear from a reliable source that she travels in style, diamonds and all.”
“Your source is misinformed.”
“Yeah?” He turned to holler up the gangway. “Jake! Get yer skinny carcass down here!”
In moments, Jake had tumbled down the ladder and fetched up at the bottom as though his toes hung over a precipice. The earl, his wife, and the crew stared at him with stony disbelief. But his panicked gaze went only to Claire.
“Jake,” she said with the kind of politeness society matrons use to cut the unworthy to shreds in public, “I’m sorry to have missed you earlier.”
“Lady, I c’n explain—”
“I am not interested, thank you. The flock has decreased by one, and you know what happens to birds left outside the coop at night.”
“Quit yer babble.” The captain, it seemed, did not appreciate metaphors correctly used. “Jake, tell us again about the countess’s jewels.”
“There’s a big diamond necklace goes all the way to her waist,” he said in a voice that cracked. “A couple ropes of pearls. Earrings and some other bits an’ bobs I seen.”
“Anything else?”
“A crown thing.”
“She wears a crown?” This seemed to be more than he could believe. “You some kind of princess, lady?”
After a fleeting hesitation, Davina said, “Certainly not.” Her voice was soft, but it held the same kind of society ice that Claire’s had. Somehow its gentleness made it even more cutting. “He means a tiara.”
“Ah. I got a woman who might like to see one of them. Maybe I’ll give it to her for services rendered.” He laughed raucously while Lady Dunsmuir’s lips thinned—not, Claire suspected, because she was disgusted, but because it was that or cry. “So. Now that we have that cleared up, why don’t you tell Jake here where the safe is, and he’ll fetch them for us.”
“The Lady Lucy does not have a safe,” the earl said steadily. “Up until now, there has been no need.”
“More fool you. Hoyt, take Jake here and a couple of others and have a look for the jewels. And to make you extra careful, Jake will take a long walk if you don’t find them.”
The blood drained out of the boy’s face. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Lady Dunsmuir paled even further, leaving her fine skin nearly grey. “You would not throw the boy overboard?”
Claire felt sick. Disgust and grief and dislike for his behavior was one thing. But no one deserved this. Not even a boy who had betrayed his closest companions for—for what? What had they offered him that meant more than his future? His very life?
“Just a little incentive to look harder, is all. Nothing personal.”
No. Murder never was.