A howl of pure rage echoed among the rocks, somewhere on the ground behind Spider Woman, as the sound of the airship’s laboring engines faded into the distance.
Claire picked herself up and retrieved her scarf from the wreckage of the lamp, but it was soaked in the chemical compound from which the light had emanated. Nothing emanated from it now but a harsh, sour scent that burned her nostrils.
It had served its purpose well. She could see the outlines of objects now—well enough to scoop up the crumbly clay earth and cover the scarf and the wreck of the lamp. Then she picked up one of the lengths of rope that had secured the sandbags to the ballast irons, and wound it around her waist, over the corselet.
One never knew when one might be glad of a length of rope. Earlier tonight, for instance.
For the moment, though, the most urgent course of action was to stay out of sight until Ned Mose and his gang of wreckers had gone back to town. She shuddered to think what might happen to the Dunsmuirs and the crew in that event, but the truth was, she was powerless in the matter.
However, she could do one thing. She could find Rosie and the hatbox and put a little distance between herself and Mose’s rage at the same time.
The sun had not risen, but the rocks had taken on shape and substance now. She climbed down somewhat more carefully than she had scrambled up, keeping a sharp eye on the ground below in case someone rounded the base of the monolith. In her black raiding rig she could give a fair impression of a shadow if she had to, despite the red and ochre colors of the rock.
The sound of the locomotive tower’s engine firing up halted her so suddenly that she skidded on gravel. Taking refuge in the inky shadow of a huge tumbled boulder, she stretched up just enough to see the tower rumble off toward the wash and Alice’s shack. When no one followed on foot, Claire assumed the pirates were crammed inside.
That did not mean Ned Mose wouldn’t send someone to see what had alerted the Texican airship and caused it to evade their trap.
Darting from rock to rock, holding her breath and feeling exposed every time she was forced to step out on a ledge and drop the next level down, she made her way back to the desert floor. Her hands were scraped raw from the sandpaper consistency of the rocks, and all the knuckles on her left hand had been bruised when a handhold had crumbled.
But she was free. And alive. And so were James and the crew of that ship.
Knuckles would heal, and torn stockings could be mended. But if that ship had gone down … Claire shuddered.
She began an easy run in the direction the hatbox had taken, angling away from Spider Woman and toward the lake over which they had passed. Somewhere between the water and the spire of rock, there had been a stand of scrubby trees, bigger than the round bushes that seemed to uproot themselves and go rolling across the landscape, but smaller and less densely leafed than any tree back in England.
She had just passed an outcropping of rock that jutted out of the side of a much smaller wash when the sun broke over the horizon and painted it with gentle shades of yellow and cream. This country, harsh as it was, had its beauties, then. Who could have imagined that ordinary rocks could possess colors from scarlet and carmine to lemon yellow and deepest ocean blue? Someone who made a study of geology could make his fortune writing papers about—
In the distance, she heard the sound she had been waiting for—and dreading.
An engine.
She whirled and flung herself at the base of the outcrop. There was no shelter—it was merely a heap of rock piled in the middle of a hump of land—but the eye saw what it expected, did it not? Not what was there.
She stretched out at the base of it and did her best impression of a shadow.
The sound grew louder, and then she saw it.
The great golden fuselage of the Lady Lucy fell up into the sky above the red mesa, made a quarter turn to the north, and moved gently off into the clear bright morning.
Claire lay in the dirt, leaning on her elbows, her mouth hanging open. Under the twin blows of shock and dismay, it didn’t even occur to her to leap to her feet and signal, and by the time it did, the Lady Lucy had already reached a thousand feet, where no one save a hawk or an eagle could see a small, disbelieving figure jumping up and down, waving frantically.
She sat abruptly in grass that had once been green, but was now burned and dry from the sun.
They had left her!
Marooned her in the middle of a desert, without a single ally or even so much as a drink of water!
How was this possible? Granted, she had been somewhat distracted in trying to save the lives of an entire ship and crew, but for goodness sake, couldn’t they at least have sent out a search party when they found she was missing?
They must have freed themselves and returned to the ship immediately after the floodwaters had receded. Clearly she had been a little hasty in jumping out of the window when if she had merely waited half an hour, she could have walked out the door with the rest of them, and at this moment be floating off into the air, blissfully unconcerned about what was happening on the ground.
No, that was not true. For who else had they left?
Rosie, that was who.
Ooh, if she ever saw the Mopsies again in this life—and even in the next—they were going to get such a spanking as they would never forget for the rest of eternity. They were a flock! They might consider Claire able to take care of herself, but she would never have imagined Maggie and Lizzie would leave Rosie behind to starve to death tied up in a hatbox.
Well. She had set off to find Rosie, and find her she would. Even if there were only two remaining members, they were still a flock.
She got to her feet, dusted off the front of her sadly abused shirtwaist and the swag formed by her rucked-up skirts, and resolutely did not look toward the north as she set off once again.
A cry sounded behind her. A bird of some kind. An eagle, perhaps, circling and wondering if she would make a tasty morsel.
Another cry, urgent, breathless.
Then— “Lady! Lady! You’re not dead!”
Eagles did not speak English—especially the kind born within hearing of Bow’s bells.
She turned, hardly able to believe the evidence of her own eyes. “Mopsies?”
“Lady!” Lizzie burst into tears and flung herself at Claire so hard that she staggered.
“She told us you was dead,” Maggie exclaimed in tones clogged with betrayal.
Claire had never been at once so happy to see anyone, and so dismayed. The Mopsies. Left behind as well. Innocent children! What was the world coming to?
She fell to her knees and hugged both of them so hard Lizzie squeaked.
“Who told you?” she finally found voice enough to say, releasing them.
“Her ladyship. She said someone pushed you out a window into that flood.”
“She was correct in general, though not in the particulars. I jumped. It seemed a good idea at the time. But why are you here and not on the Lady Lucy? Did you see her lift just now?”
“Aye.” Maggie grinned. “Such a to-do there’ll be when they open our room and don’t find us. Oh, and ’ere—” She turned and presented her back.
“Good heavens.” With quick fingers, Claire undid the knots in the silk sash and freed the lightning rifle. “I am utterly lost. You had better tell me the whole story while I put this back together.”
By the time the Mopsies had finished catching her up, their words tripping and tumbling over one another as each jostled for her part of the night’s work, Claire had put the coupling back in its place and blasted a nearby stump to kingdom come.
It felt extremely satisfying.
“I cannot believe you shimmied down a guy rope,” she said. “You could have been killed!”
“Well, we wasn’t,” Lizzie said, ever logical. “But Rosie might be. We came to find ’er and we found you instead!”
“As well, you mean. Come, we must locate a stand of trees about halfway between here and the lake. I believe she may have touched down there. And as we go, I’ll tell you my side of these events.”
They were as impressed with her diverting the Texican ship as she was with their sliding fifty feet down a guy rope.
“Each of us is a lady of considerable resources,” Claire said at last. “Which we will have to employ shortly now that we are left behind.”
“Wot about that Alice?” Maggie wanted to know. “She might help us.”
“I hope so, but other than a bite of tea, I cannot see her being able to give much assistance. Her father will see to that.”
“Lady.” Lizzie tugged on her sleeve. “Ent that them trees you was talkin’ of?”
A swale sloped gently into what might have been a creek bed in a moister climate. But the trees must have found something there with which to nourish deep roots, because a line of green followed the turns of its dry banks.
“I shall take the far side, if you two will cover this side,” Claire said. “Walk a hundred yards in each direction and meet back here if you don’t find her. We will move outward after that.”
“And don’t forget to look up,” Maggie reminded them. “You know ’ow Rosie is.”
The copse had hardly a hundred yards to its name, but Claire searched every foot of it, including peering through the branches of the trees for a flash of reddish-brown feathers—even one lying on the ground might have been a clue. That is, if one assumed Rosie had escaped the hatbox. If she had not, then they could be guided by the mottled colors of the balloon.
But after an hour, both searches had borne no fruit.
“Move away from the wash twenty paces, and search again,” Claire said. “And you might call. Rosie will answer if she is able.”
“Because that’s ’ow birds tell who’s in their flock,” Maggie said.
“Polgarth the poultryman taught you well in our brief visit.” Claire smiled. “We are a flock, and Rosie knows all our voices.”
Maggie put a hand on Claire’s skirt to stay her. “I knew you wouldn’t leave us. I told ’er ladyship so, I did. Cos we’re a flock.”
A lump rose in Claire’s throat, and she knelt in the dust, taking both their grubby hands. “We are more than a flock. I consider the two of you my family. When his lordship filed our traveling papers for this voyage, he registered you officially with the Foreign Office as my wards. That means that nothing can separate us except our own free will.”
“Wot about Tigg?”
“Him, too. But not Jake, because he was above the age of fourteen.”
“That rascal Jake,” Lizzie exploded, dropping Claire’s hand. “I’d like to know how ’e feels now, left alone wi’ them pirates. I bet he’s missing us bad and wishin’ ’e’d done things different.”
Claire’s heart drubbed in her chest, making her a little lightheaded. “My dears—” Did they not know?
But then, how could they? The girls and Willie had been concealed in the ceiling during those dreadful moments, and then they had all been separated. Oh, if only there had been anyone else to say these words!
But there was not. There was only herself to say what must be said, to look after these two little lives when she had no idea what the next hour might bring.
“Lady, don’t look like that.” Maggie’s gaze searched her face. “Did something happen to Jake?”
There was nothing for it. She had never lied to these children, and she was not about to start now. “Ned Mose lost his temper and pushed Jake out of the hatch,” she said in as soft a tone as she could manage.
What little color was left in Maggie’s face drained out of it. “Wot hatch? There’s any number of—”
“An outside one. The one in the main gangway, where we embark and disembark.” Claire swallowed. “He would not tell where you and Willie were, so Mose threw him out. We were three hundred feet up.” Her throat closed and she whispered, “There is no way he could have survived.”
The tears overflowed Maggie’s eyes and she threw herself into Claire’s arms. “I wish we’d never come on this awful voyage,” she sobbed. “I want to go home.”
“I’m glad,” Lizzie choked out. “’E ’anded us over to them pirates and it’s no more’n he deserves.” But her eyes were piteous.
“Do not blame him, darling,” Claire told her over the top of Maggie’s head, and held out a hand to gather her close once more. “I have no doubt he was forced to do what he did. But whether he was or was not, no one deserves an end like that. We cannot even give him a Christian burial—we don’t know where he—where he is.”
It took several long moments before Maggie’s sobs turned to hiccups and at last to sniffles. Lizzie kicked viciously at a clump of dry grass. “We might not know where ’e is, but we’ll find Rosie. I know we will.”
And not half an hour of dusty searching later, a cry went up. “Lady! Over ’ere!”
Claire took off at a dead run, leaping into the wash and out again like a species of antelope. Maggie waved her over to a clump of rocks, and there was the balloon, snagged on it.
“Is she here? Is Rosie here?” Please don’t let her have been eaten. Please don’t make them endure one more loss on this morning of terrible losses.
Both girls knelt on the ground with the hatbox between them. In a trice they had yanked off the cords securing the lid, and Rosie exploded out of it like a pheasant flushed from the grass. With a squawk of indignation, she stalked in a circle, ruffled her feathers, and glared at the girls as though she had not forgotten who had put her in there.
Lizzie sat back on her heels, grinning. “Aye, Miss Rosie, it were our fault, but yer not some nasty pirate’s breakfast, now, are you?”
Rosie turned her back on her, and both girls giggled in sheer delight at the perfectly ordinary sight of the hen scratching and pecking up the grass seeds.
Claire drank it in, feeling as though she had come up for air after a long time underwater.
One small red hen, safe as houses.
Compared to the dreadful events of the last twelve hours, it seemed like a wonderful blessing, indeed.