Celeste’s body felt as if were crumpling like paper stuffed in a shoe. She knew to the moment when Loveday realized the truth. Her friend’s shoulders stiffened, her eyes narrowed to slits of ice. And her head turned, slowly—agonizingly slowly—toward where Celeste was shrinking into the fabric of the sofa.
“This is yours,” she said, and there was no doubt in the accusation.
There was also nowhere to hide, no way to pretend. Her balloon may have gone down, but she was the one plummeting.
“C’est vrai,” Celeste said. “It is mine.”
Captain Trevelyan placed the journal in his lap. “I believe, Miss Aventure, that you owe us an explanation.”
“Mademoiselle Blanchard,” Loveday corrected him, body so still she might have been made of stone. “She is Madame Blanchard’s daughter.”
He too stiffened. Oh, this was worse and worse!
“My mother is Sophie Blanchard,” Celeste admitted. “The Emperor’s Chief Air Minister. My father was Jean-Pierre Blanchard.”
“The man who first crossed the Channel by balloon,” the captain said. “From England to France.”
Celeste nodded. “The Emperor has challenged my mother to do the same, but from France to England. She has not been able to achieve it.”
He thawed as only a superior-minded Englishman could do. “Small wonder. The prevailing winds blow up the Channel and toward France. The Channel squalls have prevented the French navy from crossing. I can’t imagine a balloon would get far.”
Now came the hardest part. Celeste moistened her lips. “This is about more than a single balloon. The Emperor has in mind a Grand Armée, an invasion of England from the skies.”
Captain Trevelyan dropped the journal on the table with a thud, as though he could no longer touch it, and Loveday sucked in a breath.
“Is it possible?” she demanded of Celeste. “These drawings, your presence here—you managed it, didn’t you?”
“Not quite, or you would not have discovered me,” Celeste reminded her. “I had intended to land in the marshes of Kent, where smugglers would have ferried me and my balloon home in triumph. But one of your squalls blew me off course and downed my balloon. I would have died had you not rescued me.”
Loveday’s face softened just the slightest. “Be that as it may, you found a way from France to England by balloon. Others could do the same.”
“Not without my journals,” Celeste told them. “L’École des Aéronautes has all except this one, but the students will get nowhere without my mother’s support, and she has stopped trying. It was no lie that she plans to marry me to an elderly man. The most despicable Comte d’Angeline. This is how the Emperor wants her to prove her loyalty. He is the only one who believes crossing to England is possible, and I think even he has begun to doubt.”
“Then he cannot gain access to this journal,” the captain said. He rose, scooped up the journal, and tucked it under his arm, as though it had become a state secret to be held rather than a betrayal to be flung away.
Celeste surged to her feet. “No! Please! That is all I have of my life’s work, my father’s dream.”
He stepped back, as if determined to keep a distance between them. “A dream that could threaten every man, woman, and child in England. I cannot allow that.”
Loveday was frowning at him, but Celeste felt as though he was stealing her very breath. To think her work had survived the crash, that it was within reach! Oh, what she and Loveday could do with that information! And he would not give it to her.
With every ounce of will, she put on a contrite smile and resumed her seat, dropping her gaze to her lap. “Oh, but Captain Trevelyan, I will show it to no one. You know I have no way to communicate with France.”
“There are ways,” he said cryptically.
She looked up, but he had turned to Loveday. “I don’t believe Miss Blanchard meant you or your family any harm, Miss Penhale, but if you would prefer to withdraw your hospitality, I will understand.”
Withdraw her hospitality? Throw Celeste out of Hale House? Was she never to share scientific secrets with Loveday again? How could she bear it?
Loveday regarded her a moment, and Celeste held her breath.
“That shouldn’t be necessary, Captain,” she said at last. “I believe it best if we keep all this quiet. No need to inform my mother or father of Miss Blanchard’s true identity.”
He frowned. “Surely your father—”
“Needs nothing more to concern him,” she snapped. “I must insist on this, sir. You may protect the journal. I must protect my family.”
He nodded slowly. “Very well. But if I learn Mademoiselle Blanchard is still lying and more treachery is afoot, I will speak to your father.”
“If Mademoiselle Blanchard is lying, you may well have to speak to the War Office,” she retorted. “Now, thank you for calling, but you must go. My family will return shortly, and the less said, the better.”
He bowed, and it was all Celeste could do not to rush him and snatch back her journal.
“Good day, then, Miss Penhale. Please know that if you need anything, you have only to send word.” He regarded Celeste as if she were a burr he’d found under his horse’s saddle, an annoyance easily tossed aside. Then he left them.
Mrs Kerrow, coming in with the tea tray, made a sound of distress that their guest was leaving so soon.
“It is all right, Mrs Kerrow. Miss Bl—Aventure and I will have our tea here.”
“Tell me now,” Loveday commanded the moment the housekeeper was out the door. “Were you lying? Should Papa be escorting our family to London for safety?”
“You are safer here,” Celeste murmured. “The soldiers would land near Dover and march to London to capture your prince.”
Loveday paled. “How could you turn your science to such an end?”
Celeste threw up her hands. “It was a challenge! A way to see my mother returned to her former glory. He has her perform at events like a trained monkey. The famed aeronaut, Marie Madeleine-Sophie Blanchard, reduced to throwing out explosives to captivate the crowds. The school she and my father started, now holding less than a handful of students with nowhere else to go. What did I care about a nation that has done nothing but trap us, bait us, squeeze us ever tighter? I never knew there were kind, clever English until I met you and your family.”
Her chest was rising and falling at an alarming rate. Had she been a steam engine, Celeste would have tripped the relief valve already.
“I have heard little good of your Emperor,” Loveday said, “but I have admired his stance on science and his willingness to allow women positions of power. I certainly never thought everyone in France was the same sort of arrogant windbag.”
Her mouth twitched, despite herself. “Windbag?”
“Yes, you know—one who speaks far too much and believes every word to be priceless.”
The smile won. “I would almost think you know our Emperor.”
Loveday’s smile broke free as well. “I may not have been properly introduced, but I’ve met enough fellows like him.” As quickly as her amusement had come, it faded. “I will have your word, Celeste. If you are to stay in England, and continue associating with my family, you must disavow support to Napoleon, in all of his causes.”
Celeste raised her chin, stood at attention like the aeronauts her mother had trained. “I do. I promise. England must be my home now. I see that. I will protect her with my life.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” Loveday said.
Words. They could not be trusted. Even good drawings could not be trusted until they were proved by action and turned into reality.
And Celeste had seen Loveday’s drawings.
Celeste had gone to her room, her face bearing the tracks of tears, and Loveday had taken refuge in the orchard with the sunshine and the chickens. Mrs Kerrow’s hens hunted in the grass beneath the trees, ever hopeful that a windfall might have come down in the night. Somehow their busy industry comforted her. She sat upon the bench under the old Beauty of Bath, and before long one of the hens came to loll in the sun at her feet.
Already, not fifteen minutes after Arthur Trevelyan’s abrupt departure, she was having second thoughts about swearing both him and herself to silence.
She had known of Sophie Blanchard in the sense of knowing about her, from the broadsheets and even the caricatures in the scandal sheets. But she and Arthur were the only ones in the country who knew about her falling star in the Emperor’s sky, the subsequent heartless exchange of a daughter’s body for the mother’s loyalty.
Loveday shuddered. Had she been in Celeste’s position, with a balloon and all her skills, she would certainly have done the same. But she was not in Celeste’s position. Had she not used the very words, “return in triumph”? Had Celeste succeeded—landed unharmed in Kent and been ferried back by the French smugglers—England would now be in the greatest danger it had ever faced. And the Prince Regent, the government—not one of them would have known about it until the blue, white, and red striped balloons of the invading aeronauts appeared in the clouds, innumerable and unstoppable.
Loveday had no doubt at all that the same vision had been in Celeste’s mind. A vision of triumph, not terror. She could have done it and seen her beloved mother reinstated to all her former glory as Chief Air Minister, no doubt sailing at the head of the invasion.
Loveday choked and buried her face in her hands. The hen looked up, searching the sky for what had disturbed her, then moved under the bench just to be prudent.
What was she to do now?
Celeste knew all the details of Loveday’s plans for the air ship. For the prince’s prize. How quickly she had fallen in with them! How delightful it had been to bounce ideas off her keen brain, making the project even more possible. How wonderful it had been to have a friend with the same tastes and even greater knowledge than she had been able to gather in the whole of her life.
And therein lay the rub. She had had a friend half an hour ago, and now she did not.
Celeste had vowed loyalty to England, it was true. But had Loveday been marooned in France, she would have been quick to do the same and not meant a word of it. But the other option did not bear thinking of—the option Papa would surely insist upon if he knew. If Celeste were taken up by the coastal militia as a spy, there would be a businesslike hanging and no more said about it.
Of course Celeste had vowed her loyalty.
But only time would prove whether she meant to keep that vow.
Arthur Trevelyan walked slowly down to the flat stone on the cliffs, deep in thought. Or rather, his thoughts had taken wing out over the Channel, as he attempted to apprehend the sheer scope of Bonaparte’s plans. The audacity of it! Had Celeste Blanchard succeeded, the Prince Regent and his government might even now be in mortal danger.
He knew, of course, of Sophie Blanchard’s reputation and the esteem in which Napoleon had once held her. The fact that the Chief Air Minister had a daughter whose skill and determination were at least her equal was an utter surprise to him—he, who had once been one of the best informed spies in the Walsingham Office. What terrible luck had washed her up at the foot of Hale Head, where a tinkering girl resided! The question was, did the French have an equivalent branch of government named for a famous spymaster? Would Bonaparte have been informed of Celeste’s activities? Had it been his plan all along to insert a French aeronaut along their coast? If so, why had she said she didn’t know how to communicate with France?
Outside of asking Celeste directly, he supposed, there was no way to know. She must be living in a constant state of fear. Had he been captured in France and was facing a military tribunal, he would have gone to his death still loyal to his own country and his mouth firmly closed. But then, he had spent some years in His Majesty’s service and was not a terrified girl.
A terrified girl. Was he asking the wrong questions in this case? Could Celeste really be just a girl using the skills she possessed—changing the world of technology in the process—in order to escape an arranged marriage?
Sometimes the smallest things—the most intense emotions—provoked the greatest advances in history.
Look at Leonardo da Vinci, the Architect of Venice, and all the inventions with which he was credited. Necessity might be the mother of invention, but intense emotion could certainly be its other parent. It was a historical fact that the Doge of Venice had been so afraid of being found and assassinated by his enemies that he had commissioned da Vinci to put the entire city on a massive gearworks rather than the pilings of logs the city fathers had proposed. Arthur had read many a treatise on the engineering triumph, so far ahead of its time that it seemed miraculous even in this enlightened age. Twice a day, the church bells rang, the bridges rose, and each neighborhood turned into a different position. The terrified Doge had been dead four hundred years, and still his legacy lived on.
Would the contents of that journal do the same, penned by a frightened but determined girl?
Awkwardly, Arthur got to his feet, thankful that for once he had not been too proud to bring along his cane. When he reached the house some minutes later, he labored up the stairs to his room, where the oilcloth pouch containing Celeste’s journal lay in his desk drawer. At the very least, withholding these drawings could mean the downfall of Bonaparte’s plans for good. They must be preserved somewhere safe. It was fortunate this old farmhouse had a few secrets left to which he and his father were privy. He pressed a rosette on the carved mantel of the fireplace, and a panel snapped outward. He slipped the pouch into the cavity behind it, then pressed it closed.
At least now the upstairs maid would not carry Celeste’s journal away thinking it was good only to be thrown out. Or worse, that its pages might be torn out and used to write letters on.
With the journal secure, what ought he to do now?
Arthur needed to talk his thoughts through with someone who was not only dependable, but also sensible and fiercely intelligent. He could not keep this solely to himself, not when he was barely able to walk about the estate. In a pinch, it would be better if someone else knew the facts of the matter. Not the coastal militia, with whom, as an Army man, he was barely on speaking terms. But someone he had trusted since they were boys. Someone who knew engineering better than nearly anyone in Truro.
His friend Emory Thorndyke.