Gilded Lily (6 page)

The wall opposite the door was faded gray paneling, unpainted, undistinguished. But where the light of the pocket torch slipped over the wood, Barnabas detected a spot that looked out of place. A seam where one needn't be, and a patch where the touch of many hands might have worn down the rough wood. He pressed his palm to the wall, and after a moment the grinding clank of chains announced his success.

“Oh, well done, my lord. Very well done indeed.”

The light flickered on from behind the dull paneling, and a moment later the wall itself slid to one side with a whir of gears. An ordinary lift cage greeted them, unassuming brass and wood with an accordion door and a lantern that appeared to be electric. Beyond the framework, bare wooden walls were visible.

Barnabas didn't want to take that lift. He wanted to be anywhere else. But Fred was already pushing the latch up, sliding the door open. She entered the cage and looked back at him, and then she smiled as though embarking on a delightful adventure and inviting him along for the ride. It was the grin of a mischievous tinker lad with nothing to lose . . . or that of a society maiden who excelled at playing such a dangerous role.

A world of choices, she'd ascribed to him. He saw few choices at the moment, and none of them good. But he found he couldn't look at that smile and not follow it. The ridiculous hat, the padded tummy, the hands covered in grime to mask the dainty and well-manicured fingers, none of that mattered. Miss Freddie Murcheson was grinning at him and beckoning, and he must follow. So he did, and let her shut the lift door behind him.

F
OR A MOMENT,
Freddie doubted herself. That moment fell when the lift sank into the earth and she saw the bare rock walls beyond the fragile brass framework in which she and Lord Smith-Grenville stood. The light flickered a few times as they descended, and more than once she felt her mind flirt with panic when she thought they might be plunged into subterranean darkness.

But clever Smith-Grenville kept his pocket torch out, occasionally spinning it back into brightness as they clattered downward. If the lift motor was electric, the torch wouldn't help much, but at least they would be buried alive with enough light to see by. Or they would discover something new, something she hadn't been meant to find. A familiar rush of energy seized her, the impending thrill of exploring the forbidden.

She risked a longish look at her companion when he seemed distracted by the passing geological display, and wondered at her first assessment of him. Although he looked somewhat ghastly in the harsh light, she could also see every minute action of his face's musculature, each subtle change in expression in that visage she'd thought so calm and bland. Perhaps it was exhaustion, not just lighting, that laid Smith-Grenville so bare now, but whatever the reason Freddie liked the outcome. The subtle hint of curiosity and fear in the fine lines beside his eyes, the puzzled tension of the corner of his mouth. Even in profile she could see the almost-furrow of his brows, as the lightbulb sputtered and he gave his torch another crank.

He wouldn't hang. She was almost certain of that. Even if her father did find out what a horrible spy Smith-Grenville made. Still, perhaps it had been harsh of her to drag him along for this evening's work. She had no idea what she was doing, which was all very well and good for her, but hardly fair to someone who was practically an innocent bystander. Usually she worked alone.

“Can I help you, Miss Murcheson?”

“Sorry?”

He met her gaze, and a long moment ensued during which Freddie could feel herself blush, and Smith-Grenville's face went through an array of minute expressions she couldn't quite read.

“You were, um . . . you were staring. A bit. Or so it seemed to me. Do I have something on my face?”

Your lovely soul.
“No, nothing. I apologize. I didn't mean to stare.” But she kept doing it. He was the first to look away.

“We seem to have arrived.”

The lift settled into place with a grumbling thump, and Barnabas slid the door open and practically threw himself out of the tight space.

Following more cautiously, Freddie saw a large chamber that was clearly a work in progress. Hewn from the bedrock, the lift vestibule was twice the height of a large man and as long and wide as her bedchamber in the manor house outside Le Havre. The floor was polished native stone, and the corners were full of the detritus of construction. Tools, finely milled wood planks, lengths of copper tubing, and what appeared to be a partially assembled lift cage of much more elegant make than the simple model they'd traveled in. Glass panels with a frosted pattern at the edges, held in place by a hardwood frame with elegant brass fittings. When it was completed it would rival the lift in any fine hotel.

At the far end of the room an archway led to a broad corridor with two pairs of narrow grooves carved into the floor along each side. The pile of lanterns and wiring at its entrance suggested it was as yet unlit, and this turned out to be the case. Barnabas fired his torch again and they set off into the darkness.

“It looks like a track for some sort of vehicle,” he ventured after they'd walked for several minutes in silence. His whisper echoed harshly against the stone walls. “There's a metal rail in there.”

“I wish we could find whatever it is that runs on the track,” Freddie whispered back. “I suspect it would make this distance in a fraction of the time we're taking to walk it.” They couldn't walk all night.

“Your father and the other one must have used it. Oh, what's this?”

On the right-hand track sat what appeared to be a handcar—or rather, on closer examination, a velocipede. The simple metal framework sported two seats and a complicated system of treadles and gears that led, to Freddie's great delight, to a rudimentary Stirling engine.

“Bring the torch closer! Oh, this is brilliant. Look, the treadles create a charge to heat the element that powers the engine, then the engine maintains the speed after you shift this gear. This will take us as far as we care to go. All we need to do is provide the momentum.”

“You believe you can operate that after a cursory glance?” He sounded less disbelieving than amazed, to his credit.

She nodded. “It's what I do. Climb on.”

It wasn't as smooth as described, of course. Building momentum from a dead stop was a good deal of work. Then finding the switch to start the heating process once they were in motion took Freddie a few extra moments, during which they had to hurtle into pitch blackness because she was using the torch to examine the controls on the engine casing. She had to stop pedaling in order to crank the engine itself when the element seemed sufficiently hot, the attached indicator needle creeping into the comforting green zone on the dial. Barnabas had to work all the harder in those moments, complaining bitterly as he did so. Then the first time she attempted to engage the gear shift, the velocipede shuddered so badly she thought it might come apart, and she had to ease back and reconsider, all the while pumping madly at the treadles until she thought her legs or lungs would surely give out. The second time, however, she coordinated a brief pause in their pedaling. The gear clunked into place and engaged, and suddenly they were whirring down the track along the torch's narrow beam, faster than could possibly be safe.

Barnabas laughed aloud as he resumed pedaling in a slow, easy motion. The velocity was in the engine's hands now, the treadles merely providing its sustaining heat and helping maintain momentum.

“I could go like this all night,” he claimed.

“We should agree on a time. Especially as we've no idea how fast we're really going.”

He checked his pocket chronometer, a lovely gold piece that gleamed even in the weak light of the torch. “Twenty minutes?”

“Forty-five. I don't suppose you have a compass as well? I didn't think to bring one.”

“Thirty minutes,” he countered. “We've been some time down here already, and I suspect Mr. Pinkerton won't give the full hour and a half before he investigates. We need to allow ourselves time for the round-trip and the lift ride back up. And no, I don't have a compass.”

“Fair enough. Oh . . . shine the light forward again? Not on the tunnel,” she corrected, “on the bar in front of us. We're both idiots.” Leaning forward, she pulled a lever and the tracks before them were flooded with light from the velocipede's headlamp.

“Of course it has one. And of course we only find it after I've been turning the crank on this silly thing until my hand is ready to come off at the wrist.”

“That thing isn't silly. It's gotten us this far. And your wrist will recover, I'm sure. Oh, seeing farther ahead doesn't make it any less unnerving, does it?”

“Not one bit.”

They tried not to dwell on what would happen if there were an unexpected obstacle up ahead, an unfinished track or construction debris in the way. Freddie couldn't see a way to adjust the speed, so they continued their dizzying, heart-stopping pace for the full half hour. When she finally shifted down to begin the braking process, it was almost a relief to feel the strain on her legs return, the sensation that the beast below them was once again under their control.

With the brake engaged, they slowed to a halt, and as soon as the engine stopped, the headlamp flicked out as well. Fortunately, Freddie had already noted an important feature of the tracks. At regular intervals, there were panels with levers on the tunnel wall, and they'd stopped close to one. A closer look with Barnabas's pocket torch confirmed her hypothesis.

“It's a turnaround. See there?” Training the light on the track, she followed along until she found a curved set pulling away from the straight track and leading back to the other side. She attempted to pull the lever, but to no avail. She put the torch between her teeth, using both hands to haul down on the thing. Finally, when she was literally dangling from it, she sighed and flashed the light toward a smirking Barnabas. “That's unchivalrous of you.”

As she was speaking around the torch, it sounded more like “At'th udsiwawous oh you,' but he seemed to understand her quite well.

Shielding his eyes from the glare, he grinned back, unrepentant. “You're highly entertaining to watch.”

She removed the torch from her mouth. “Would you just help, please?”

Together they managed to activate the switch, and they used pedal power to ease the cart around to the facing track before restoring the switch to its original position.

“I don't suppose this means we can go straight back?” he asked, without much hope.

“Of course not. Keep the torch fired up, my lord. Now we explore.”

The tunnel where they'd stopped looked much like it had all along, a featureless dark corridor of stone and a gridwork of comfortingly solid-appearing beams of some hardwood. Unlike the polished, shining wood in the vestibule, the beams here were yet to be finished. A few bore painted markings, possibly instructions of some sort for the workers. Other than that, however, there was not much to distinguish one section from another.

“Do you suppose they'll bury them all when they're finished, like the slaves who built the pyramids at Giza?” she mused, as they ventured deeper along the corridor.

“What, the builders? I think they'll just pay them a good deal of money to keep quiet.”

“That would certainly be the more civilized thing to do. Wait, what was that?”

He swung to face her, nearly blinding her with the torch, his hand shaking. “What was what?”

“My
eyes
.”

“Oh, I apologize. Better?” He flicked it away, and Freddie blinked until the stars cleared from her vision. She pointed to where the light now fell on the wall, which finally looked different here from one beamed-off section to the next. On one side of the beam was stone. On the other, the torch revealed a section of riveted metal sheeting. As her vision resolved further, she made out a row of three round glasses in brass frames, at roughly eye level. It took a moment for her to realize they were portholes.

“That there. Oh! We must be nearly to the mouth of the estuary by now, almost to the channel itself, if we're headed in the direction I think we are. Turn out the torch. The moon is up and it's nearly full; perhaps we'll be able to see into the water.”

“I doubt it.”

He closed the device anyway, and they waited for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. The darkness was disorienting, and Freddie nearly lost her balance when she stepped closer to the faintly visible circle of the nearest porthole. It seemed to brighten as she watched, her eyes making out more of the dimly illuminated underwater scene.

“It just moved,” Barnabas whispered.

“What just moved?”

“Everything.”

As if in confirmation, everything moved again, a disturbing sideways jolt underfoot.

At the same time, something flashed outside the porthole, and they jerked their heads in unison toward the unexpected light. Barnabas leaped to press his nose to the glass, and Freddie heard him say a word no gentleman should, as the world shifted again and the metal panels groaned. Flying to the next porthole, she gasped as a huge, dark shape in the water resolved into an approaching submersible. It shone a light on the seabed below and in front of it, nearly blinding them when the sub turned and the light blazed into the window for a moment.

Close, far too close and too fast, the sub loomed toward them, then passed mere inches overhead, just as a klaxon began sounding in some distant part of the tunnel.

“We need to move!” shouted Barnabas, grabbing her hand and jerking her back down the corridor in the direction they'd just come from. “It's an earthquake!”

She scrambled to keep up with him, wishing she'd been more enthusiastic about sport in school. “I thought it was a submersible!”

“Are you joking?”

To her dismay he let go of her hand and let her lag behind. He was only procuring the torch, however. As soon as he'd cranked it back into glimmering life, he turned and caught her hand up, pulling her along as the ground shivered beneath them once again. They made it to the velocipede and likely set a record for starting it up and bringing it to full speed, racing down the track in the direction they'd come. Freddie lost count of the times one or the other exclaimed as they went how clever they'd been, to turn the cart around before exploring. She knew it was a lie, every time. It had been luck, nothing to do with cleverness. But she would take it, either way.