Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel Page 2

  “My, my, what a lot of unusual knowledge our drowned kitten possesses. I wonder what else she knows?”

  Now Mother Mary and Clara and half the women in earshot were staring at her. Oh, if only she could wind back the last thirty seconds and take a single moment to control her temper!

  “That is all I know,” she said stiffly, controlling the urge to leap to her feet and run up the steps to the room she shared with Ella. “With the behemoth and the cavalry of mechanical horses, the Ambassador’s troops will be difficult to fight, indeed. That is why I have been encouraging you all to ally yourselves with the Texicans. They possess airships—and bombs—that are our only hope of overcoming these mechanical menaces.”

  A moment passed in which the only sounds Gloria heard were the gulps of a riverman slugging down his whiskey, and the rush and gurgle of the torrent below.

  At last Mother Mary turned back to the captain. “What other news have you?”

  “Miss Aster’s previous information about the war has proven correct. The Royal Kingdom is mobilizing, and not everyone is happy about it. There are acres of tents pitched between the town and the river as each rancho sends its conscripts. But many are not there willingly. While some share the late Viceroy’s dream of regaining the Texican Territory and its supposed caches of gold, others have no interest and are content to raise their families on their farms in peace.”

  “On the backs of their tenants’ labor,” Clara said grimly. “And that of their captives.”

  Gloria had learned that Clara’s daughter Honoria had been captured during a raid, and was now somewhere on one of the massive ranchos, forced into servitude until she escaped … or died. Captain Stan acknowledged the lost member of their company with a lift of his tin mug, and someone obligingly filled it.

  “What of the present Viceroy?” Mother Mary asked, gripping Clara’s hand in support. “Does he share his father’s dream? Word has it that he’s barely out of the schoolroom, and the studious sort. He would have gone to university in the old country had his father not died and left him to inherit the throne.”

  “All true, from what I hear. One wonders how a bookish boy could be convinced to go to war.”

  “It is part of their culture,” Gloria said bitterly, still stinging from the experience of her own capture. “The boys are trained to war from infancy—though from what I understand, no one has actually fought in two hundred years.”

  “Remember what she told us—they bought these mechanicals to do the fighting for them,” one of the rivermen said. He was the mechanic who ought to be looking after the boat’s engine, but what was he doing? Drinking. If a captain cared about his boat and its crew, Gloria thought sourly, he ought to have words with the man.

  “Would that we had one of the Texicans’ airships, and could travel to San Francisco de Asis in a matter of hours to ask him,” Captain Stan said with a laugh.

  To Gloria’s knowledge, the only airship within five hundred miles was Alice Chalmers’s Swan, and she and Jake and Captain Hollys were probably back in England by now. Evan had to be dead. A hollow feeling opened up in the region of her heart. Another missed opportunity. Another reminder that she was achingly alone, with a monumental task ahead.

  A task to which she had best set her mind before too many more days passed. Sound business practice dictated that when one needed something—such as the cessation of a war—one began at the top. And in the Royal Kingdom, the top meant the Viceroy.

  “How far is San Francisco de Asis from here?” she asked.

  “It must be six hundred miles of mountains and desert and wildcats and well-armed horsemen,” Mother Mary said. “Why? Are you going to see the Viceroy? Shall you ask him to abandon his war?”

  “Someone must,” Gloria said, pleased at her quick understanding. “Why should it not be me?”

  A merry laugh rang out, and to her enormous chagrin, the entire company joined in.

  * * *

  Gloria slipped away from the gathering and climbed to one of the southwest terraces, where one could see the sun set. The long, low rays of winter turned the canyon walls to a deep golden red, and the river reflected both the rosy tints of the cliffs and the cold blue of the evening sky. She breathed deeply of air that smelled of dust and pine and the smoke from the cooking coals, and under it all the fresh, cool scent of life-giving water.

  And now, here came another scent—clean sweat, warm cotton, and engine grease. Over her shoulder, she saw Captain Stan take the last stair and emerge onto the small terrace. Gloria lifted her chin and regarded the sunset once more, concentrating on its transient beauty since it was clear she was not going to be permitted to enjoy it in peace.

  His boot heels clunked on the stone as he joined her, leaning on the stone parapet a little distance away. “It’s never the same twice, is it?”

  She did not deign to reply. Perhaps if she gave a good impression of stone herself, he would lose interest and go back to his crew. He could have a wonderful time laughing with them. Or at them. She felt his gaze upon her, and tilted her chin another notch.

  “I apologize for laughing earlier. I should have realized that you were serious about going to speak to the Viceroy, and would take offense.”

  Hmph. Of course she was serious. Did she look as though she were here on a grand tour? Did the women of his acquaintance enjoy being the recipients of his laughter, his disbelief, his derision? Someone had to convince the young Viceroy that going to war was not a practical plan. Was it so very hard to imagine that an intelligent, capable woman should be that someone? If at present she did not have the resources she needed, that was certainly no excuse for hilarity. A gentleman would at least have offered to help.

  “You are silent,” he observed. “Will you not accept my apology?”

  She might have, if the sting of that laughter had faded. Which it had not. “I hesitate to expend the effort when your rudeness will no doubt be repeated in future.”

  “Come now, Miss Aster. We have been friends until now. Surely you won’t hold a laugh against a man? There are few enough to be enjoyed in this hard country.”

  “I am not accustomed to being the object of ridicule,” she said stiffly.

  “I imagine not.”

  “And what do you mean by that, pray?”

  “Only that you strike me as a woman who has been used to giving orders. To servants, perhaps, or to those over whom you have some authority.”

  “As a man who also enjoys some authority himself, it surprises me that you would find it so amusing in others.”

  “I don’t find authority amusing—only hubris.”

  So thoughtful and yet so impudent! “I am not a victim of hubris.”

  “Then perhaps you are deceived, for that is the only explanation for your courageous but utterly impractical suggestion.”

  It was not in the least impractical. It was simply difficult to execute.

  “Someone must convince the Viceroy that going to war for gold that does not exist and lands that have long been called home by others will only result in death and disaster for his men, to say nothing of the innocent on the other side of the border.”

  “Why do you care so much, Miss Aster?” he asked after a moment, moving a step closer. “What in a gently bred young lady’s past could compel her into the desert to take on an army all by herself?”

  “I have no intention of taking on the army,” she responded crisply, sidestepping his question as easily as one twitched one’s skirts out of the path of tramping boots. “Only the Viceroy.”

  She could swear he chuckled, and she came this close to marching back across the terrace and leaving him with only his amusement for company. But when he spoke, there was no trace of a smile in his tone. “Tell me, how would you do it? How would you reach him?”

  She had given it quite a lot of thought during the long nights when she could not sleep for worry. And fear. And regret.

  “I should find a guide, and go disguised as a man,” she sa
id with firmness. “Surely the Californios do not prevent ordinary travelers from boarding a train and taking it to San Francisco de Asis?”

  “They do not, but I’m afraid I cannot imagine you as a man. I’m having a difficult enough time imagining you as a witch, and yet here you are before me, roses and all.”

  She resisted the temptation to advise him to read more, thus nourishing his poor powers of imagination.

  “Ella painted my face,” she said instead. “She is very good—I cannot even recognize myself. I have every confidence she could turn me into a boy if she put her mind to it.”

  “That would be a waste,” he murmured to no one in particular. “But it will not do, you know. You would be discovered within days, and a woman traveling alone in these parts is in grave danger. The rancho families produce gentlemen, but there are soldiers and horsemen and workmen and craftsmen by the thousands who are not so well bred.”

  A rancho family had produced Ambassador de Aragon, the warmongering megalomaniac behind this disaster, and look how he had turned out.

  “Why should I be discovered? No one will be so inquisitive about an ordinary traveler.”

  Now he did chuckle, right out loud. Ooh, if she had been a boy what pleasure she would take in giving him a good hard poke in the nose!

  “With that grace, and that posture, and those cheekbones? You cannot help being a woman, and a woman cannot travel alone in the Royal Kingdom, both for reasons of safety and because of the culture.”

  “Speak in specifics, sir, not generalities.”

  “A gentlewoman never travels alone. She has an escort, usually consisting of servants and a brother or other male member of her family, or her husband.”

  “Then I shall not travel as a gentlewoman.”

  “Then you risk being set upon, raped, and killed.”

  The bluntness of those specifics stopped her breath, his words thrown as quietly and accurately as a knife. When her lungs would expand again, she said, “There are many women in the Royal Kingdom, I am sure, who are neither gently bred nor dead.”

  “There are. If they are not under the protection of a rancho or in the care of a shopkeeper or school, then they are working girls in the whorehouses or begging in the streets.”

  “Cannot a woman set up a business and support herself as an independent being?”

  “Not in the Royal Kingdom, no. Women are under the protection of their fathers until they marry, and under that of their husbands afterward.”

  Her heart sank. She had hoped it was the sort of custom that men spoke of proudly, but that women did not take very seriously. Clearly her hopes were in vain. “How positively medieval.”

  “I quite agree. So you see how exponentially difficult your task becomes.”

  But now she had thought of a solution. “Then I shall hire the aforesaid guide, and pretend to be married to him.”

  One winged eyebrow rose under the brim of his disreputable bowler hat. “You would sleep in the same room as a stranger? I don’t know whether to be shocked at the damage to your reputation, or dismayed at the damage to your person once you closed your eyes.”

  “I should, of course, hire someone trustworthy,” she said through gritted teeth. Was there no end to the rocks he must kick into her path?

  “I wish you luck. The only men you know out here are my crew, and much as I like them, I wouldn’t share a room with a single one of them.”

  Now she did face him, her frustration mounting with every word out of his mouth. “Can you not give me a helpful suggestion? It is very difficult to stop a war when one hears nothing but negativity and pooh-poohing. I expected better of a man as well traveled and resourceful as you appear to be.”

  Her attempt at a scolding ran off him like the water purling off the rocks below. “You are determined to do this, Miss Aster? Will you tell me why confounding the Californios is so important to you when most women would have fled back to where they came from long before now?”

  That was no answer. She bit back the angry words that crowded her tongue and hauled on the reins of her temper. “I will tell you once I have achieved my objective, and not before.”

  “So there is a reason.” His dark eyes searched her face, making her grateful that he could not see her true expression through the face paint of a flowery skull. “It must be a very powerful one for you to risk your life to see it through.”

  She owed him nothing, particularly not an answer as complicated as hers must be.

  “There must be a man in the equation somewhere,” he mused at last, when the silence had gone on too long. “A woman may be driven to great things for love.”

  “Oh, what utter nonsense!” she exploded. “A woman may be driven to great things simply because she has the sense to act and the means to do so! And while I do not at present possess the latter, I certainly possess the former.”

  His eyes widened at her vehemence, and she would have congratulated herself at finally getting past the shell of his humor if she hadn’t been so infuriated.

  “You are not doing this for love?”

  “Certainly not! Cannot a woman act simply because it is the right thing to do? Can she not possess the heroism and courage to attempt what seems impossible, what seems laughable to others?”

  “Of course she—that is, I suppose—”

  “I will thank you to keep your remarks to yourself, sir. And now I must bid you good night. I have plans to make.”

  “Miss Aster. Meredith.” He put a hand on her arm as she whirled to march across the terrace in the most dignified of exits. “Please. Don’t go.”

  “I shall go where I please, thank you.”

  “I have no doubt of that. But listen to me for just one moment. No, don’t be angry again. I have a suggestion. A concrete suggestion that just might work to help you accomplish your goal.”

  She must breathe calmly, and think rationally. And his hand was far too warm on her wrist—as it had been under her hand when they had danced together several nights ago. She removed it from his grip rather pointedly. “What do you propose, sir?”

  “I propose—” He stopped. Swallowed. Then held her astonished gaze as he went down upon one knee. “Why … I propose. Miss Meredith Aster, will you do me the honor of becoming my wife, so that I may accompany you to San Francisco de Asis and help you stop this war?”

  Chapter 2

  The citizens of the Royal Kingdom of Spain and the Californias were skilled at a number of things---building churches and cathedrals of extraordinary beauty, extracting gold out of the kingdoms they had conquered in their explorations in centuries past, and contriving a network of vast ranchos controlled by rich nobles who educated their sons in the mother country and educated their daughters at home in the useful skills of embroidery, music, and hospitality.

  They were also far better at building gaols than a nation had a right to be.

  Evan Douglas squirmed in the thousandth unsuccessful attempt to find comfort on the thin pallet he had been given to sleep on, which was all that separated his bruised and exhausted body from the stone floor of his cell. He supposed he ought to be grateful. The Ambassador to the Fifteen Colonies, Augusto de Aragon y Villarreal, needed him to operate the massive mechanical behemoth in which he had so naively come to Gloria Meriwether-Astor’s rescue ten days before, and for that reason he was housed in relative comfort.

  The groans and cries that issued from the cells farther down the passage, and from the underground pits below, told him that not all the prisoners were so lucky. And, of course, the moment someone else was found to do the job—someone who owed his allegiance to the Viceroy and not Her Majesty the Queen of England—Evan had no doubt he would find himself out on his ear and begging for a bowl of gruel in the common pit with the others.

  As it was, he shared this cell with three men, lying in varying attitudes of discomfort about him. The sun would rise soon, so he reached up and made a vertical mark in the mud wall with one torn fingernail to mark the beginning
of the eleventh day.

  “I don’t know why you bother,” said Joe, the young man who lay next to him, and turned over in disgust.

  Evan ignored him. Joe was young and prone to secretive habits, and had proven most unlikeable. But he’d grown up on the river and so had been assigned to the work team for the dam that was under construction. He had had an education at some point in his past, which put him in this block of cells and not in the pit, where he might be hitched to one of the work gangs. Should that happen, Evan supposed, it would be difficult for his overseers to find him when his knowledge was required.

  Barney, on the opposite wall, had been tossed in here sometime after Joe’s imprisonment and before that of Evan. He had been beaten twice since Evan had been here and still would not reveal who he was or why he had been in San Francisco de Asis without identity papers, but he was a cheerful sort despite his injuries. It was clear from his diction that he was a gentleman, and clear from his knowledge of steam and hydraulics that he had been educated, perhaps even as well as Evan. But more than that, Evan did not know, and neither did their captors.

  The fourth man had arrived only yesterday, and had not said one word in response to the overtures of his cellmates. Evan was not convinced he could speak English. Even now, he cried out in his sleep, and said something in trembling tones in a foreign tongue. He too must be useful in some way, or he would not have been shanghaied, but until they saw him on a work detail, they would probably not discover what it was.

  The light strengthened, and Evan saw that Barney was awake too, his gaze on the silvery sky framed by the barred opening of the window. No isinglass. They were subject to whatever weather or vermin that happened to find its way through the foot-square opening, which was why they all slept closer to the other walls. Given a choice, Evan would take weather over vermin. But he had not been given a choice.

  “Another cloudless day,” Barney said. “Shall we go hunting, or simply mount up for a ride along the river before it gets too hot?”

  Joe said something vicious in the Californio tongue and hunched a shoulder, while their newest companion gasped and sat up, terror exposing the whites of his eyes.