Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel Read online

  “I had the privilege of flying here with Gloria from Philadelphia on Captain Chalmers’s ship, Swan,” he said. “She knew that her father had been selling arms to the Californios and she was determined to stop the final shipment and the war that is brewing. We enlisted the help of air pirates in Resolution, in the Texican Territory. However, in the course of the battle that ensued between the pirates and the Californio mercenaries, I was knocked unconscious. When I regained my senses, Gloria, the Californios, and their steam train Silver Wind were all gone. I pursued her in the behemoth and had just caught up to the train when we were surprised by a flash flood. The Californios assured me she had been swept away alive by the river, but despite my searching the banks for days, I could not find her. Then, once I was over the border with the behemoth, they informed me I was a prisoner of war and that Gloria was dead. They had simply been stringing me along in order to get the behemoth into the country.”

  Joe had been listening with interest, his chin resting upon his folded arms. Now he shook his head. “Sneaks,” he said contemptuously. “Always talking about honor and showing none.”

  “Quite so,” Evan agreed. Joe was not in the habit of conversing voluntarily, so perhaps this little victory would encourage Barney to talk, too.

  “Now I see.” Barney nodded, as though to himself. “You have no proof that she is dead, nor any that she is alive. But what can a man do under circumstances such as these?”

  “Why, that is obvious.” Dutch smiled a real smile now. “You must escape in the behemoth and try to find a sign of her. As I shall do for my wife and children. As any man of honor and compassion would do.”

  With a snort of derision, Joe shook his head. “If it were that easy, old man, would they be sitting here still?”

  “We cannot merely escape,” Evan told them. “Whether she is alive or dead, we need a plan that will also aid her in her efforts to stop this war.”

  “We might destroy something on our way out,” Barney suggested.

  “Start with the dam.” Joe’s eyes glittered with hatred. “It’s going to raise the level of the river and kill everything that lives in the canyons.”

  “The only things living out there are desert creatures and witches,” Evan said.

  “Meaning no great loss if they all die?” Joe snapped.

  Evan braced himself. Joe might be slender, but he would not put it past the man to leap upon him and beat him unconscious with his fists alone. “Of course not.” Were those tears swimming in Joe’s eyes? “Is there someone among them who means something to you?”

  “None of your nevermind.”

  “Getting back to the plan,” Barney said, waving the young man into his place against the wall, “how might we do this?”

  “No matter in what way we choose to do it,” Evan said, “one thing is necessary. The behemoth goes with us.”

  Joe made a sound of derision into his folded arms. “It’s not like stealing a rifle. Hard to hide it when you’re on the run—and you have to keep it powered. What if we run out of coal or water in the desert?”

  “We will be following the river, you ninny,” Evan snapped. He very much disliked having facts pointed out to him that a child could perceive. “I will not leave it here to be used against the innocent. Whether or not we destroy the dam, the war will still proceed.”

  “No. The war cannot proceed without the dam,” Dutch told them thoughtfully. “How else can they penetrate so deeply into the Texican Territory with the greatest ease and the least expense?”

  “Trains,” Joe said.

  “They are too easy to stop. One stick of Canton explosive and an entire line is rendered useless. No, they need the river. They have been building that dam for some months before we all arrived. Clearly it is for a larger purpose than merely flooding out a small number of inhabitants.”

  “Then we use the behemoth as the instrument of its destruction,” Barney said. “We fill it with explosives and set it walking toward the building site, where it destroys both itself and the dam.”

  Evan wanted to shout his disagreement, but he pushed the urge down until he had marshaled his thoughts. He was not used to basing his decisions on emotion—on this ball of resistance in his gut that absolutely refused to allow the behemoth’s destruction. But it was as though they were discussing taking a part of him—of his skill or accomplishment—his very being—and lobbing it at the problem with no more thought than if it had been a stick of Canton gunpowder.

  “And what if we fail?” he asked when he had himself under control. “What if we send the behemoth walking at the dam and it doesn’t blow it up?”

  “It will put a nice hole in it.” Joe seemed quite cheered by the prospect.

  “I don’t think so. How much dynamite and gunpowder would be required for such a task? Is filling the pilot’s chamber going to be enough?”

  Dutch pinched his lower lip between his fingers as he considered the question. “I do not believe so. An entire train car ought to do it, but it is not likely that we might be able to help ourselves to one of those.”

  “There’s the crane,” Barney pointed out.

  “The spur runs up to the building site.” Clearly, Joe had caught his drift, but Evan was still all at sea.

  “Please explain.” He would much rather they left the subject of the behemoth behind, so he was quite prepared to play the simpleton.

  “The crane can move tremendous weight. With only one of its four arms, it can pick up a rail car from one track and move it to another,” Joe explained. “I’ll wager that if you gave it enough steam, it would chuck a car quite a distance. And explosives are fairly light.”

  Evan had seen the multi-armed cranes working near the rail spur in the course of his labors, but it had never occurred to him that they could be made to throw their cargo as well as pick it up.

  “So we steal the explosives, fill a car with them, pick it up with the crane, and fling it at the dam, where it blows up.” Barney stretched out on his pallet. “Child’s play … if you’re a giant.”

  Dutch gazed at him, and then up at Evan. “The services of a giant, it seems, are the only thing we do in fact possess.”

  Chapter 3

  Gloria stared at Captain Stan with something akin to horror. “Do get up,” she said, her cheeks burning with embarrassment and irritation. “You look ridiculous, to say nothing of uncomfortable.”

  “I’m quite serious.”

  “Get up, I beg of you, before someone sees you.”

  He rose, and she took a step back lest he make things look worse by taking her hand. “You don’t believe my proposal to be sincere.”

  “Certainly not.” She turned to gaze at the deepening sky, thankful both for the fading light and her skull paint. “You are the next thing to a pirate, making a living by who knows what nefarious means. Only a madwoman would believe a word.”

  “And yet I have never lied to you.”

  “While we have only been in one another’s company for a matter of hours, that is enough time for a man’s true colors to show.”

  “I feel as though you mean to hurt me, Miss Aster. But surely not. Not a young lady of your breeding and aspirations to the betterment of the world.”

  She would not look at him. She would not acknowledge by the slightest softening that his proposal had taken her utterly by surprise, and that defensive words were falling out of her mouth in a torrent with no thought behind them except that they might push him away from her.

  It did not help that he was right.

  “You hurt me when you laughed earlier.”

  Oh dear. Now she sounded like a sulky child. There were reasons that occasions like this called for certain polite expressions. She just wished she might have recalled them a few moments sooner.

  It took all her courage to face him once again. “I am grateful for the honor you have done me in—”

  “Are you? A moment ago you called me ridiculous.”

  If he did not stop provoking her
, she would never be able to remember the polite things to say. “—asking me to be your wife, but I am sure you will not be surprised when I must decline.”

  He gazed at her a moment in a way that left her unable to look away. No words stabbed the air between them, only an unhappy honesty in which she saw herself clearly for the idiot she was.

  She did not want him to think her an idiot. Was it surprising that she wanted a man to look at her as Andrew looked at Claire—as a heroine, as the only treasure worth possessing in an uncertain world?

  What nonsense was this?

  She cared nothing for his opinion, and he clearly cared nothing for hers if he could laugh at her, publicly shame her, and then toy with her sensibilities in this manner.

  Just as you have now privately shamed him.

  She was not obligated to accept a man’s proposal just because he offered it. If that were the case, she would have been Mrs. Winston Humphrey and no doubt be expecting Winston Humphrey Junior by now, back in Philadelphia.

  “I’ll be ashore until the day after tomorrow,” he said. “We are doing repairs on the Queen to give her a little more speed, and adding some defensive mechanisms in case they’re needed in the next few months. If you change your mind, I’ll be about.”

  “It is impossible, regardless of my state of mind,” she said past the constriction in her throat. “There is neither church nor registry nor minister within a hundred miles.”

  “There you are wrong,” he told her with no small satisfaction. “Padre Emilio is in Santa Croce, the crossing about ten miles downriver from here. He travels around to all the churches in these parts on an annual circuit, hearing people’s vows and a year later baptizing their babies. He performs last rites and funerals, too, but that is outside the purview of this discussion.”

  “Don’t be so sure,” she muttered.

  But he had heard her. “That’s a thought,” he said, a sardonic tilt to his lips. “You can murder me on our wedding night and proceed with his party as a widow. That ought to get you at least halfway to San Francisco de Asis, if you’re lucky.”

  If he had thought to make her laugh, he was unsuccessful. “There has been enough death in my life thus far, sir,” she whispered, “that I have no desire to be responsible for more.”

  “Of course not.” Now he did capture her hand, and for one shocked moment she did not remove it. “I spoke carelessly. Forgive me.”

  She pulled it from his grasp and at last had the sense to cross the empty terrace herself, since he showed no signs of leaving.

  “I hope you will reconsider,” he called as she reached the stairs. “I have never been any woman’s only hope of success, but they tell me there is always a first time.”

  Gloria did not dignify that with a reply.

  It cannot be said that she spent a comfortable night in her hammock bed, watching the moon move past the window in remote majesty and wondering how she, who had been the toast of Philadelphia society, could have been reduced to fielding proposals from disreputable outlaws in the wilderness.

  Then again, she herself was a disreputable outlaw in the wilderness.

  As for his character, there again this pot could hardly call that kettle black. She suspected him to have been a gentleman at one time, educated in the ways of society as well as academics, and he had made it plain he’d observed the same of her. So perhaps their backgrounds might be similar. She could only assume there was no Mrs. Captain Stan, though no doubt he kept a mistress in every river crossing from here to Denver.

  Well, what was that to her? He had proposed a union of convenience—though if the truth were told, the benefit lay all on her side. Traveling as his wife, she had at least a slender chance of reaching San Francisco de Asis and requesting an audience with the Viceroy. But what would a marriage to her net him other than a companion whose ambitions and opinions bore no resemblance to his own? Or did they? No, that could not be so. He was a riverboat captain and a gambler, not a crusader.

  Was he some kind of knight-errant, coming to the aid of a damsel in distress, or simply a world-weary man who had seen too much and was ready for a new diversion of the most outrageous kind? An adventurer who would saddle himself with a wife, just for a lark?

  She didn’t want to be a lark. She wanted to be a heroine—or at the very least, a woman who could set out to make things right and succeed. There simply had to be a way to achieve that without becoming Mrs. Captain Stan. And what was the man’s last name, for goodness sake? She couldn’t imagine any woman waiting until she was standing at the altar to find out.

  There were simply no answers to these questions. She must talk with someone who knew him and had more familiarity with this strange and uncooperative world.

  She must talk with Mother Mary.

  With one decision made of the many that lay before her, Gloria fell into a restless doze that left her slightly the worse for wear in the morning.

  Gloria found Mother Mary shortly after breakfast in one of the storage rooms, spreading corn with an odd short-tined rake. She looked up as Gloria hesitated in the doorway, then jerked her chin toward a similar rake standing against the wall. “Make yourself useful.”

  “Do you have a moment to talk?”

  “I always have time to talk. But that don’t mean we can’t work while we do it. What’s the trouble?”

  “No trouble,” Gloria hastened to assure her. She picked up the rake and imitated the other woman’s smooth strokes, leveling out a pile of corn all over the clean stone floor, where presumably it was to dry. “But I seem to have a problem that only has one solution, and I hoped that between us, we might come up with another that is more palatable.”

  “More problems, or more solutions?”

  “The truth is, the solution that has just been suggested to me is the last one I want to take. I know there must be others.”

  “Oh?”

  Gloria got into the swing of the rake, scattering corn across the floor in fans. “Captain Stan proposed to me last evening.”

  With a clatter, Mother Mary lost her grip on her rake. When she picked it up, her eyes were snapping in their dark painted hollows. “What are you saying, child? Are you funning me?”

  “Indeed, I am not. After laughing at me so rudely over the suggestion that I should approach the Viceroy about stopping this war, he had the temerity to propose marriage. He says that going to San Francisco de Asis as his wife is the only way that I will reach that city without being assaulted or murdered.”

  “Them Californios do have their odd ideas about women traveling and living alone,” Mother Mary conceded, still sounding a little winded.

  “Well, yes, but surely there must be a way to travel in their country if one is not a citizen. Surely they do not set upon ordinary folk from other places merely as a matter of course. Why, I understand Madame Tetrazzini herself has sung at the opera house in San Francisco de Asis, and presumably she was not accosted.”

  “Don’t know who that is, but there ain’t many travelers crossing these borders anymore, especially since they began to build that dam and people started going missing.”

  “Missing?”

  The older woman resumed her raking. “Mm. I’ve heard a story or two. Seems even if you take the case to the authorities, nothing gets done other then a lot of paperwork and prevarication.”

  The addition of problems to the teetering pile that already confronted her was not what Gloria had come for. “So are you saying that Captain Stan is in the right? That if I am to attempt to reach the Viceroy, the only way that I can do it is with a wedding ring on my finger? Why can we not simply pretend to be married?”

  “You could,” Mother Mary allowed. “But when they ask to see your papers, what will you do then? The marriage lines in these parts are a serious business, probably because the missions have made it so, marriage being a holy ordinance and all.” The strokes of her rake scratched to a halt. “Seems to me you have two choices. Either you abandon your brave plan, or you ta
ke the captain up on his offer. He is an honorable man, and goodness knows plenty of the girls along the river will vouch for his skill between the sheets.”

  An epithet that had never before escaped Gloria’s lips escaped them now. “That is hardly relevant to the current situation!”

  Mother Mary shrugged. “You’d be surprised how soon it might become, as you say, relevant. He’s a healthy man, and there don’t seem to be much wrong with you. You might see it differently sooner or later.”

  “Certainly not!”

  But the older woman only shrugged. “Suit yourself. That’s a little talk you’ll have to have with him.”

  It was becoming increasingly obvious that Mother Mary saw no problem whatever in her marrying a perfect stranger, if she was so intent on achieving her goal. It was also increasingly clear that Gloria’s options were even more limited than she had feared.

  “Thank you for your honesty,” she said. “I suppose that in the end, I am simply going to have to decide how important it is to me to stop this war.”

  She had underestimated Mother Mary, if the dark, furious gaze that met hers was any indication.

  “I’d say it was pretty darned important. You’ve seen the water rising. You’ve heard what Captain Stan has to say. We witches can do what we must from here, but the truth of the matter is that if something don’t happen soon, the water will wash us right out of our homes. We’re pretty powerful, but we’re no match for the mighty Sangre Colorado de Christo.” She gazed at her hands for a moment, clenched on the rake handle, and Gloria was sure she saw the glimmer of tears on her lashes before she blinked them away. “If you’re the only woman in this entire country who’s brave enough to try, then me and the girls will do everything possible to give you what assistance we can. Even if that means sending my own daughter with you to play maid-and-mistress.”

  Gloria drew in a long breath. “Mother, no.”

  Ella’s mother now gripped the rake as though she might use it as a weapon. “She speaks the lingo even better than Captain Stan, and she knows enough of reading and writing to make it practical to send or forge a message if you need to. You can’t pass for a poor woman, that’s certain, so you may as well pass for a well-to-do one. For that, you’ll need servants and a wardrobe something better than what you got. We might be able to find a dress or two in the storeroom, and hats and laces and such. They won’t be in the pink of fashion, but they’ll do to fool a soldier—or a priest.”