So, this was why Loveday read engineering treatises for fun! How wonderful to find someone who understood, even so far from home. A shame Marcel wasn’t here. He would have been more than happy to talk to Loveday about nuts and bolts, gears and pulleys. And they could all read Minerva and talk long into the night about the sheer possibilities of powered flight.
Just the thought of Marcel’s swarthy face made her smile slip as Loveday turned the cane whiskey into the lane leading to Hale House. As pleasant as Celeste’s sojourn with the Penhales had been, their kindness held her captive. She had no idea how to reach the smugglers or whether they’d be willing to help her by carrying a note—much less her person—to France. Much as she felt an affinity for Loveday at that moment, she was still alone.
“Who could that be?” Loveday asked.
Celeste frowned at the hooded landau waiting on the drive, its coachman out checking the horses. “You do not recognize it?”
“No.” She pulled Rhea to a halt, and a groom came running to take charge of the whiskey.
Mrs Kerrow, the Penhale housekeeper, met them in the entry hall. “There’s a lady here to see Miss Aventure.” She eyed Celeste as if none too sure of this new development.
Loveday untied the bow under her chin and handed her bonnet to the housekeeper, but her gaze was on Celeste. “I wasn’t aware you knew anyone else in the area.”
She sounded a bit affronted by the idea.
“I wasn’t aware I did, either,” Celeste assured her as she removed her bonnet as well. She accompanied Loveday to the withdrawing room.
Mrs Penhale was entertaining a woman who was small of stature and quick of movement. Celeste could only see the back of their visitor, but her heart leaped. Maman? Here? She rushed around the sofa. A stranger gazed back at her, grey eyes bright in a lined face. Up close, it was clear that her dark hair had gone more salt than pepper.
Mrs Penhale smiled. “Madame Racine, allow me to present our guest, Mademoiselle Aventure. Celeste, this dear lady is an émigré of some standing in our area. She has tutored many of our young gentlemen in your language.”
Celeste bobbed a curtsey. “Enchantée, Madame.”
“Et moi aussi,” she responded, hands clasped over the head of an ebony walking stick. “But let us speak English. This is my home now. I understand it is to be yours as well.”
Not if she could help it.
But Mrs Penhale was nodding, so Celeste took her seat beside the lady on the sofa even as Loveday perched in the wing chair she favored nearby. How tempting to pour her heart out to another Frenchwoman, but not with an audience. And Madame Racine had made it sound as if she had already decided never to return to France.
“Mrs Penhale and her family have been so kind to allow me to stay,” she told the lady. “I know I cannot impose much longer.”
“You are welcome for as long as you like,” Loveday’s mother promised her. “I would hope for the same treatment if my daughters were lost in a foreign country.”
“But you are not lost, are you, Mademoiselle Aventure?” the Frenchwoman asked with a knowing smile.
Her stomach plummeted. What had she done now to give herself away?
“Not with such friends beside me,” she hedged with a smile all around.
Madam Racine beamed. “But of course. You will find the English to be an intelligent, compassionate people, not at all what the Emperor would have us believe. You have met the Emperor?”
As Celeste Blanchard, daughter to the famous Sophie, the answer was too often for comfort. He also had sharp eyes like this woman, as if he could see inside one. But would Celeste Aventure, the heiress, have met him?
“Before we fled France for Portugal, my mother was required to present me at court,” she allowed. “I did not enjoy the experience.”
“Such presentations are not the most pleasing in England, either, I hear,” Mrs Penhale said, nose up. “His Royal Highness keeps delegating them to the Queen Mother so he can spend more time with his silly contraptions. And as for the Princess of Wales taking on such a duty—pfft!”
“The prince’s inventions may yet prove to be the turning point in this war,” Loveday insisted loyally.
“And yours as well, Mademoiselle Penhale?” Madame Racine asked.
When Loveday gaped, speechless, the Frenchwoman tutted. “I see you on the road to Truro. The engineers at the steam works are handsome, non?”
“Non,” Loveday said emphatically even as the housekeeper appeared in the doorway.
“Forgive the interruption, ma’am, but a Mr Thorndyke is here to see Miss Penhale, and he did not seem inclined to leave his card.”
Loveday leaped to her feet, then seemed to control herself by smoothing her skirts. “I’ll speak to him. I’m sure it will only take a moment.” She hurried from the room.
“Please excuse her,” Mrs Penhale told their guest. “I fear you are right about the attraction of the steam works. Mr Richard Trevithick showed an interest in Loveday’s aptitude for such things when she was younger. We indulged the pastime. It seemed harmless enough, and it furthered her education. But she seems to have taken an unnatural interest in mechanics.”
Celeste had to bite the inside of her cheek to keep from responding. Loveday was very clever. She had ideas beyond what others considered. Her mother should be proud!
“Perhaps she has found her calling,” Madame Racine said. “Her purpose. It is what we all seek. Do you not agree, mademoiselle?”
“I do indeed,” Celeste said. “There can be nothing finer than knowing you are making a difference, whether that is in a steam works or in a sailing ship or in a drawing room.”
Madame Racine nodded. “And you? How will you make a difference?”
Oh, but her smile was slipping now. She’d had such dreams! All her plans, for naught. No way to salvage her equipment. All that silk, wasted! Who knew where it had ultimately come down after she’d jumped. But to give up on everything, settle herself in England?
Non, non, non. The Penhales could not possibly allow her to stay here forever. If they insisted that Loveday marry, how much more would they expect it of her—for a letter to her imaginary parents in Portugal would never see a reply. Both of the women were eyeing her, as if measuring her for a wedding gown already. Had they picked out the groom as well? Someone old, established, who would think a woman only as good as her dowry?
Her fabricated, nonexistent dowry?
Celeste popped to her feet. “Thank you for reminding me, Madame Racine. My purpose is to show gratitude to this family for taking me in. I must see to Miss Penhale, who ought not to entertain a gentleman alone. Excuse me.”
She picked up her skirts and dashed from the room, feeling as if the Comte d’Angeline howled at her heels. She barreled into the entry hall and smacked into a tall, muscled frame.
Large hands reached out to steady her. “Pardon me, miss.”
She looked up at the gentleman. He had short, sandy hair swept back from a lean face. Amélie would have admired the chiseled line of his cheekbones, the cleft in his formidable chin. Josie would have gazed into the sea-green eyes and ordered a skein of silken thread in the color. At the moment, Celeste was more aware of a tap-tap-tap, as if her heart raced, its sound audible in her ears.
Then Loveday shifted, and she realized it had been the sound of her friend’s foot against the flagged floor.
“Mademoiselle Aventure,” she said, one hand wrapped around a roll of parchment, “allow me to present Mr Emory Thorndyke.”
This was the man who had so incensed Loveday, the one who challenged her every move at her beloved steam works? Celeste stepped back, and his hands fell from her shoulders.
He gave her a short bow. “Miss Aventure, a pleasure.”
Oh, but it was hard to remember her role and not give him a dressing down. She fluttered her lashes. “Bonjour, Monsieur Thorndyke. Comment allez vous?”
His smile apologized. “I never learned French, I fear.”
“So he is as dense as you claimed?” she asked Loveday in French.
“Mais oui,” Loveday responded with a smile. Then she switched to English. “Mr Thorndyke came to tell me that thanks to his information from Portsmouth, he’s developed a new boiler design and would like me to look at it.” Her hand tightened on the parchment.
He shifted on his feet, setting all six feet of him to swaying. “It was Mr Trevithick’s idea.”
“Then we must thank Monsieur Trevithick,” Celeste said brightly. “And we must thank you, Monsieur Thorndyke, for coming such a distance. We should not keep you further. Bon voyage.”
“I hadn’t planned on taking a voyage,” he protested, but Celeste wiggled her fingers at him. Given no choice this side of propriety, he bowed to her and Loveday and departed.
“That was brilliant,” Loveday said as the door closed behind him. “Thank you.”
Celeste curtsied. “What are friends for?”
“May I impose further?” she asked, head cocked.
“I have certainly imposed on you enough,” Celeste said. “What would you have me do?”
“Come out to my workshop, and we will have a look at these.” She waggled the roll.
There was no resisting such a temptation.
With everyone in the household occupied elsewhere, and Papa having made himself scarce with his steward upon the arrival of Madame Racine, whom he did not like, Loveday felt no compunction at all about taking refuge out in her workshop.
Celeste sidled in, eyeing the sideboard, which had not moved from its position against the wall. “Is it still… active?” she asked in a low voice.
“It is being very well behaved,” Loveday assured her. “Sideboard, this is Celeste Aventure. She means you no harm and is my friend.”
The sideboard did not move, which Loveday took to mean acceptance.
She unrolled Emory’s drawing and weighted its corners with whatever came to hand—an iron nail, a bell with no clapper, two cogs. Then she and Celeste bent over them.
He had changed the shape of the boiler and made it sleeker, with components that she suspected were directly out of Portsmouth. Here was the release valve, here the fire door. It was unobjectionable in every way.
“It is not very interesting,” Celeste finally said. “For this he had to ride six miles?”
“We both peeked at the sketches for Minerva’s boiler,” Loveday said. “We have been spoiled.”
“And yet…” Celeste indicated a line here, a curve there. “If these were adapted more closely to Monsieur Robert’s ideas, rather than that of a steam ship, think how much more efficient the pressure would be, even if it is not at altitude.”
“I hope you will not be offended if I say the likelihood of Thomas Trevithick adopting the ideas of a French engineer are as good as his adopting mine.” Loveday sighed. “He allows me to suggest small changes, and improvements to the process, but Emory and he are in charge of design exclusively.”
“Hmph. Let us exchange this so dull design for Monsieur Robert’s. I will be in a much better temper afterward.”
Loveday opened the book to the center illustration of the ship’s design, which could be removed entirely and spread out upon the bench. She moved the lamps closer.
“You see, of course, why the ship went down,” Celeste said soberly.
“It was not for the reasons the newspapers gave, certainly.” She pointed. “It was this.”
Minerva had gone down just outside Edinburgh, with the scandal sheets and the military band and a crowd of a thousand horrified people to witness it. Monsieur Robert had built in failsafes so that the ship would not plummet or burn, but glide in an arc to the ground. Still, his career had not survived the public humiliation when everyone had expected a triumph.
He had installed a prototype high-pressure boiler just like theirs, with components that could not withstand what was being asked of them.
“If only I had seen this before we began the build,” Loveday said.
“Would they have listened to you?”
“No,” she admitted. “But at least I could have tried, and resisted the urge to say, ‘I told you so’ afterward.”
“I wonder if one could build a much smaller version out of different materials,” Celeste mused. “Just enough to power, say, a touring balloon.”
“I suppose one could, if one had a good design and could lay hands on materials.”
Celeste held her gaze.
“No,” Loveday said. Her heart had begun to pound for no reason at all. “It is impossible. Even if I could scare up some scrap metal at the steam works, I am forbidden to go to Truro.”
“But I am not,” Celeste said.
The two young ladies stared at each other.
Nothing moved—not even the sideboard. And when Rosalind called, “Loveday!” from the kitchen garden, both of them jumped as if they had been doing something not only unsuitable, but illegal to boot.
“Loveday!” Rosalind’s voice was closer. “Madame Racine is leaving, and Mama says you must come.”
“She is not calling upon me,” Loveday muttered. She rolled up Emory’s design and laid it with Monsieur Robert’s book in the topmost compartment of the sideboard, to be collected later.
They gathered in the drive as Madame Racine was handed into the landau by her coachman. “I hope the two of you know you will be most welcome, should you wish to call,” the older lady said to Loveday and Celeste.
“Why, how kind.” Mama stared, as though she had never seen Loveday smile before. “We should be delighted.”
Madame Racine knocked on the door and sat back, and the landau rolled away up the gravel drive.
Mama waited for Loveday to take her place at her side to proceed into the house. “Since when, my dear, are you so pleased to call upon a lady who has not had the pleasure of your company above twice a year?”
“Since Celeste has come to stay,” Loveday said with a glance over her shoulder at her, walking beside Rosalind and leaving Gwen, as the youngest, to bring up the rear. “Do you not agree that opportunities to speak her own language in comfort and safety would make her stay more pleasant?”
“And are you sure that there is no other motive for traveling to Truro to pay these calls?”
“No indeed, Mama. Though I must tell you that we are obliged to go to the steam works tomorrow, to return Mr Thorndyke’s design. He was courteous enough to solicit my opinion, so I must be prompt in its return.”
“Of course you should. Celeste shall go with you.”
“I was hoping so, Mama.”
Her mother turned at the door of the drawing room while her sisters scattered to their rooms and Celeste hovered in the background. “I must thank you, Celeste, for the beneficial effect you are having upon my daughter. She has become positively amiable lately.”
“I am certain it is your own tutelage and upbringing that is the cause, Madame.”
Mama gave a snort and proceeded into the drawing room, leaving Celeste to raise her eyebrows and Loveday to cover her mouth, lest a peal of sudden, imprudent laughter spoil everything.