Fields of Iron: A steampunk adventure novel Page 8

  “Pardon me,” she said. “I have just remembered someone else I must write to.”

  Mr. Elias Pitman must be informed of her whereabouts, and of her marriage, without delay.

  “Telling your friends and relations the good news?”

  She settled herself at the folding desk once more. “If they do not think me dead, it is only right to let them know of our … marriage.” She began to write as he watched her from the door. “Please, do not let my presence prevent you from packing.”

  “It doesn’t,” he said. “I’m still recovering from the sight of a woman at my desk. It’s a novel experience. I want to take it in.”

  She bit back a caustic remark about where else in the room his women were likely to be, and focused on the brief lines toward the end of her letter.

  If you can, please make enquiries into my husband’s family. He gives me no details, but I am sure he is concealing as much from me as I am from him. His name is familiar to me, and the associations are tragic, but I cannot remember why.

  I hope you are well, and that we will see one another again.

  She folded up the second letter and addressed it carefully. It could go on one of the colonial airships out of Santa Fe, she was quite sure. What a stroke of luck that Padre Emilio was so useful!

  Sadly, her poor hat had no second ribbon to offer. “Do you possess an envelope, or a piece of string with which I might tie this up?”

  “Certainly.” He fished in a drawer and drew out a red ribbon of a particularly lush and painful shade. “I meant to give this back, but you know how that goes.”

  “I certainly do not.” She took the ribbon from him using the tips of her fingers, and tied up the letter as best she could. “I must find Padre Emilio and give these to him.”

  “He’s probably still at the church. There is quite the line of couples waiting to be married. Lucky we got there first, or we might have missed the train.”

  Yes. What a very lucky thing.

  “Are those for your family?” He nodded toward the letters.

  “No. To friends.” This was dreadfully awkward. “My mother died several years ago, and my father only recently. In November.” His brows rose, and she added hastily, “Please do not judge me for not wearing mourning for him. One hardly needs to in these parts, and our relationship was … difficult.”

  “I was not thinking of that at all. Only of similarities of circumstance. My relationship with my father was also … difficult. And he is likewise passed from this mortal coil. Several years ago, now.” He turned to look through the large round porthole that overlooked the great brass wheel-and-gear assembly that propelled the boat. “I have not thought of him in months. I suppose that is progress.”

  “And your mother?” she asked hesitantly.

  “I do not know. I suppose she is well, but I have not seen her in some years. She is an invalid, which I suppose gave my father his license to behave as a single man.” His face darkened, and he reached for the latch. “I hope you will treat the Queen as your own for the few hours you are aboard her. Try to get some rest, if you can. The train journey may be … trying. The first leg will take us to Mission Nuestra Señora la Reyna de los Ángeles, and it is a journey of many hours.”

  “What will we do there? Change trains?”

  “I have already registered our party as travelers at the station here, and have been issued traveling papers, but there we must have the certificate of our marriage legally recorded.”

  “But—” Stan? Stanford? Captain? “I am sorry, you will think me foolish, but I have no idea what to call you.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, and then appeared to change his mind. “Stan is fine. If you call me Stanford, I can’t promise I’ll answer.”

  The boatmen called him Stan, as though he were a pal and not their captain. His women likely did, too. Gloria balked at sharing anything with them, even something as ephemeral as the syllables by which she addressed her husband.

  “I shall call you Mr. Fremont,” she decided. “That is what the married ladies do in Philadelphia.”

  One brow rose in mock astonishment. “Why, Mrs. Fremont, is that where you hail from? Can it be that I now know one more concrete detail about my wife other than her real name, the fact that she once had parents, and the alarming amount of her knowledge of arms?”

  Nettled, she glared at him. For goodness sake, he saw her write it in the parish register! “It is two more than I know about you.”

  “Very well, if we are laying down facts like cards and keeping our poker faces on, I will see your city and raise you another. I was born in London, but we returned to New York when I was twelve.”

  The two facts clinked together, resonating like coins thrown in a pot. She had known he was from New York. But why did she know it? Oh, why did her memory choose now to fail her?

  “I wondered why I could not place your accent,” she said mildly. “Have you been in London since?”

  “Once or twice. You?”

  “I went to school there. At St. Cecilia’s Academy for Young Ladies.”

  “I am sorry. Sounds appalling.”

  “For the most part, it was. Though I did learn how to blow up the Chemistry of the Home laboratory one afternoon. The rest of it was a dull procession of mathematics, languages, pouring tea, and walking up and down the corridors with a book upon my head.”

  He smiled. “To this we owe the demoralization of our youth.”

  She smiled to herself, and he looked at her curiously. But she was in no mood to explain. “It turned out well in the end. I met one of my closest friends there—though at the time, neither of us could abide the other.”

  A shout came from up on deck, and the captain opened the door. “Take my advice and rest. I will see you in an hour. If you give me your letters, I’ll send one of the boys to the padre with them.”

  She handed them over with great care not to touch his fingers. “Thank you, Mr. Fremont.”

  “Gloria.”

  She held one corner of the little packet, and he the other. “Yes?”

  “That is going to get very tiresome by about the eighth hour of our journey, when we are hot and covered in smuts from the train. If there is something preventing you from using my first name, then for heaven’s sake let us clear the air about it. I do not care to have my family name bandied about this country. Bad enough the good padre was obliged to say it aloud in church.”

  “I am glad he did, for otherwise I should not have known it until I saw the parish register,” she retorted. “You might be able to get away with Captain Stan on a daily basis, but I am afraid that my being addressed as Mrs. Fremont is unavoidable.”

  “Not by me,” he said. “Or my crew.”

  “But—”

  “Just do as I ask. I need not add that I am doing much more for you.”

  When the door closed behind him, she was tempted to kick it. “No, you need not add that,” she told the carved and glossy planks. “And I hope you do not intend to cast it up to me every five minutes. If you do, I shall Mr. Fremont you to death, sir.”

  But there was no reply save the creak of the ropes as the Queen swayed on the current.

  She could not possibly lie down on that bunk, where who knew how many women had preceded her. Thank heaven they were not to spend the wedding night here, for if they were, she should be hard pressed to decide whether she ought to throw him out of his bunk, or herself. Sleeping sitting up on a hard train bench was infinitely preferable.

  Instead, she folded the desk into its cupboard and prowled about the room—six steps from bow to stern, seven from port to starboard. A white shirt hung on a peg next to the washstand, where a bowl and ewer and a brush and razor stood in a brass rack designed to keep them from falling over with the movement of waves. A black string tie hung over one of the bars, and a disreputable coat hung from a hook behind the door.

  Several small cupboards matching the one that concealed the desk marched under the window. I
dly, she opened one after the other to find books, charts, a pair of boots, and a set of china and cutlery. In the fourth cupboard she found more intimate garments, upon which she closed the door hastily. The last one was smaller than the others. Inside it lay a small empty case that had likely once housed the ring upon her finger. Next to it was a picture, lying face down in its frame.

  With a glance at the door, she pulled it out and turned it toward the light. It was a daguerreotype, a family portrait, taken some years previously. There was her husband as a young man in his middle teens, standing straight as a poker with a fearsome scowl upon his face. Seated on a fainting couch was a woman dressed in the height of fashion of about the same vintage as the dress Gloria wore now. She wore her hair piled high and a pair of chandelier earrings, and her face was drawn with exhaustion or pain. Next to her on the sofa was a little girl of about five in a frilly dress and an enormous hair ribbon, and on the mother’s lap was a baby.

  With a jolt of recognition, Gloria realized what this was. A bereavement photograph. For the baby was unmistakably dead, held tightly in its mother’s arms as though the next ordeal following the photograph was the funeral, and a tiny white casket.

  Oh, how dreadful. And how terribly sad.

  At last her gaze moved to the patriarch standing behind the couch, both hands extended along the back of it as if to embrace his family … or to declare his dominance over them. Here was the man whose name her husband was so reluctant to bear. She had never seen him before—his face large, florid, and framed by a mane of light hair and a luxurious moustache. He looked like the kind of man who enjoyed excellent cognac and fine cigars, and women who wore brocade corsets and high-heeled opera slippers.

  With a quick movement, Gloria slipped the picture into its cupboard face down and closed the door.

  Here was something else she shared in common with the stranger to whom she was now married. It seemed that their fathers were wealthy men married to pale, fearful women whom they put on pedestals as miserable, housebound saints. The angels of the house, the popular press used to call them. Ignored while they were alive and sainted once they were gone.

  Gloria snorted. Well, history was not about to repeat itself in her generation. She was una bruja. In the unlikely event that Captain Stan hankered for an angel, he was in for a grave disappointment.

  Chapter 7

  “Was that an explosion?” Evan froze in the behemoth’s piloting harness, the mechanical giant likewise freezing in the act of fitting an iron beam into place on the dam.

  The Californio soldier whose duty it was to ride about inside and guard him as he worked said something sharply in his own tongue, and leaned to look out the viewing port. Joe rolled his eyes from where he worked the steam flanges.

  “He says they just fired the pressure cannon.”

  “At what?” Evan dropped the beam into place and swung the behemoth around in order to get a better look. There was only one direction from which any threat to the Royal Kingdom could come, so he brought the behemoth to a standstill facing east.

  As the stern of what must have been their target sank out of sight behind the serrated peaks of the mountains, his stomach swung and plunged with a wave of nausea.

  “That was a Texican Ranger ship!” exclaimed the guard. “How dare they enter our air space with their floating abominations!”

  No. It was not. It could not be.

  Evan’s head felt as though it would lift off his neck and float up to follow them, and with difficulty he remembered to breathe. That was not a Ranger ship. Not that blue and silver shape, so elegant and long, slicing through the sky with the ease of a fish. A shape that he remembered as well as that of his own face.

  Alice Chalmers’s ship, Swan.

  Come to rescue him. Somehow they had found him. It was a miracle, when he had given up all hope.

  And the dadburned Californios had shot at her!

  “Was it a hit?” he asked as casually as his tight throat would allow.

  “Oh, yes,” the guard said with satisfaction. “You see?” He pointed at the cannon’s crew below, on the turret that guarded the digging crews, who were practically leaping with excitement and diagramming the shot with their hands. “It was a good hit. They are certainly going down. It is a pity the Texican scum did not venture a little farther, where we could have captured them and taught them a lesson for their insolence.”

  Joe translated like an automaton, without inflection.

  Evan judged it best if he showed no more emotion than anyone might at a hitch in their usual relentless routine. But it was difficult, and he was not sure of his success, particularly when Joe bumped his shoulder as they were marching across the parade ground to their cell at sunset.

  “Whatever you’re thinking about that ship they shot down, keep it to yourself,” he murmured. “Are you crazed, to let them know you’re on the side of the Texicans?”

  “But I’m—”

  “Silencio!” That needed no translation, so Joe didn’t bother. But it was a sign that Evan’s status had changed slightly since the night he had interpreted the commander’s dream. Instead of a rifle butt between the shoulder blades, he merely got a shove.

  It was not until they were locked up again and their paltry dinner distributed that Joe told the others about the ship, and Evan was forced to wait until he was able to speak without falling to pieces before he could join in the speculation. “It was not a Texican ship,” he said, his voice hoarse with suppressed emotion.

  Instead of mocking him—for what knowledge of aeronautics had he ever shown before?—his companions simply waited.

  “What makes you so sure?” Barnaby asked at last. “I saw it, too, as did every man with eyes in the camp. It is a Zeppelin B2 long-distance vessel. An older model, to be sure, but one the Texicans have been known to fly.”

  “But that particular ship has been modified—its fuselage is silver and blue, not blue alone. It is captained by Alice Chalmers, and is the ship in which I came to this godforsaken country.” He leaned forward, putting his tin plate on the stone floor. “They have come back for me. I must get out of here. If she has gone down, they will be needing help. We must all escape without delay and go to their aid.”

  “If it were possible to do that, I’d have gone to my own aid long before this,” Joe pointed out in a tone that indicated it was accompanied by a rolling of the eyes.

  “What do you propose?” Dutch asked. “For we have already concluded that as the situation remains, it is impossible.”

  “I must confess something to you,” Evan said. Shame rose to engulf him, and it was difficult to meet their eyes.

  “You?” Barnaby shook his head. “The most you would have to confess, my friend, is taking a mouthful of another man’s water. And that’s nothing the rest of us haven’t done.”

  “No.” He dragged in a breath. “I confess I had … given up hope. I have been working and eating and sleeping like a dead man, just waiting for that eventuality. Not like you. You three have never given up—I’ve seen you watching the sky, watching for your chance. I haven’t bothered. Because I, too, believed it to be impossible.”

  “And watching a ship shot down has changed your mind?” Joe said. He could never be guilty of excessive sympathy … or words, for that matter.

  “It is one thing to give up on oneself,” Dutch mused. “It is quite another to give up on one’s friends … if what you say is true, and this ship is known to you.”

  Exactly. He had expressed precisely Evan’s thoughts, and he gave the other man a grateful look at having saved him from speaking them aloud.

  “It is true.” He took in their faces, though it was dark and all he could see was the plane of a masculine cheek here, the glitter of an eye there, illuminated by the lamp outside. “We all agree that escape using normal means is impossible. So now we must employ abnormal means. We must use the tools available to us—and that means the behemoth.”

  “It is under guard at night, as a
re we,” Barney reminded him. “And only a madman would attempt to escape during the day, with the guard they have on you—and especially now that they have that cannon. It is no old model, that I will tell you.”

  “I know,” Evan acknowledged with a sigh. “I have intimate knowledge of the wretched thing, having been employed by the only other person on the planet to have owned one.”

  Dutch stirred, as though someone had prodded him. Perhaps a rat had run over his leg.

  “You talk as if the cannon is our only difficulty,” Joe said impatiently. “The cannon, the guards and their rifles, the sheer numbers of men they will force to bring us down, the landscape, the face of the dam … if we’re talking abnormal means, just get the behemoth to fire the cannon. That would eliminate two things on your list, at least.” The sarcasm in Joe’s tone only served to remind Evan again why no one seemed to attempt escape very often anymore since he’d been here.

  It was ridiculous for a sane man even to think of it.

  But there was always insanity.

  He laughed without humor. “Yes, that’s it. I shall fire the cannon into the dam, toss it down from the turret, and while the water is carrying everyone away, skip over the mountains and go rescue my friends.” It was only by the narrowest margin that he kept the helpless, enraged tears from welling into his eyes.

  “Are you telling me that you were employed by Charles de Maupassant?” came Dutch’s voice out of the dark, hollow with horror.

  “De Maupassant, the traitor who attempted to kill the Prince of Wales?” Barney’s voice sounded like that of a stranger—or a judge facing a prisoner in the dock.

  “Yes,” Evan said a little blankly. How strange to hear that once familiar name in this remote corner of the world. “Last year. I told you—my cousins—one of them is his daughter. Or was. He is dead now, of course. That is why I came aboard Swan. Because I could not bear what my life had become in his service. I needed to do something … something positive to rebalance my accounts. To put good entries in the ledger instead of what I knew was there.”