“Oh, Gavin.” Her eyes grew wet. “I’ve been lying for so long, I’m not sure if I know how to tell the truth all the time. But I’ll try.”
He nodded, disappointed but understanding. “I suppose that’s the best I can hope for.”
The lift thumped to a halt, and Gavin opened the gates for them. At the place where the men’s and women’s dormitories diverged, they kissed and went their separate ways.
Two days later, a tap on wood snapped Gavin awake. Gavin always snapped awake, often with the ghost of Madoc Blue’s hands on his body and the first officer’s lash on his back. Months gone and he still lived those moments as if they were yesterday. By now, he had forgotten how to wake up like a normal person.
Doves cooed in the barn rafters far overhead. All around him stood a great expanse of space-the building was an empty wooden shell resting on an ancient fieldstone foundation. On the dirt floor nearby squatted a small electric generator. A heavy cord exited one end and terminated at the large, bulbous form that took up a great deal of the barn’s empty space. Gavin sat at a carpenter’s worktable strewn with drawings and tools, and he remembered deciding to put his head down for just a moment. Sawdust stuck to his cheek. The knock came again, more urgently this time.
“Who is it?” he called.
The barn sported two enormous doors that would allow a piled hay wagon to enter-or a large project to exit-but next to them was a smaller door for more everyday use. It creaked open, and Alice backed in. She wore a dark skirt and white blouse. Her honey brown hair had been pulled back under a small hat, but a few loose tendrils framed her face.
“Alice!” Startled, he leapt to his feet and hurried over to her. “Alice, what are you doing here? I didn’t say come in!”
“It’s only a barn. Besides, I couldn’t wait to tell you. You haven’t been to the main house for almost two days now, and-oh!”
Gavin plunged a hand into his coat pocket and found the silver nightingale. He fiddled with it nervously. His sleeves were pushed to the elbows, and bits of grease and sawdust speckled his forearms, and his hair looked like a haystack. In short, he looked a right mess. But her gaze went over his shoulder to the dirigible.
The dirigible was actually small, as such things went. The envelope, longer and leaner than most, was perhaps the length of two cottages and only as high as one. It barely eclipsed its own gondola, which rested on the floor in the final stages of completion while the envelope hovered overhead. Gavin had been about to set the generator in place when he decided to take a rest.
“Are you building this?” Alice asked in wonder.
“Refitting it, actually. Only the envelope is new. I’ve been working on it off and on for a few months now, but lately the work’s been going faster. Has it really been two days since I’ve been in-?”
“It has. Why didn’t you want me to come in?”
He flushed a little. “I didn’t want you to see it until it was finished.”
“Oh. I’m sorry. Well, since the cat’s out of the bag, I may as well have a look.” Alice set the tea tray down on the table and walked slowly around it. The dirigible kept its ropes taut, and a fine mesh seemed to hold the envelope’s fabric together, a thin, loopy lattice that pressed against the cloth from inside, rather like a lacework skeleton.
Gavin watched Alice in silence, turning the clockwork nightingale over and over in his fingers and feeling oddly unsettled at her appearance. At long last, Alice had left her fiance for him. The memory of each kiss they had shared clung to his skin like individual talismans. But the ease with which Alice lied still bothered him.
Gavin suppressed a groan as Alice completed her circuit of the airship. It wasn’t fair. Everything was supposed to be wonderful now that Alice had joined the Ward and admitted her feelings for him. Did life ever go smoothly?
“What do you think?” he said, and waited for the polite lie.
“I like it. It’s very sleek,” she said. “Very modern.”
“I see,” he said neutrally, though his heart was tearing inside. She had lied-again.
She twisted one hand in her skirt. “But,” she added slowly, “it’ll never fly, Gavin. The envelope is too small to lift a gondola that large.”
And Gavin felt abruptly light. “Really?” he said. “You think so?”
“Darling, it’s obvious. I don’t even have to work out the math. What were you thinking?”
In that moment he could have leapt to the faraway ceiling. “Help me anyway.”
Careful not to trip over the cord, he lifted the little generator with easy strength and hauled it up the short ramp onto the gondola’s main deck, which smelled of linseed oil and sawdust. Alice snatched up the tea tray and followed. Gavin lowered the generator in place on the deck and set to work with a wrench to bolt it down. Alice laid the tray on the deck next to him. Teapot, bread, butter, jam, sliced ham. Red rose in a vase. His stomach growled.
“When did you last eat?” she asked.
“I don’t remember. I’m almost done and I want to finish.” He grabbed a piece of bread and butter from the tray and wolfed it down. “What couldn’t you wait to tell me?”
“What?”
He reached for another bolt. “When you first came in, you said you couldn’t wait to tell me something.”
“Ah. I know what to do next.”
“About what?”
“Oh,” Alice said. “Oh dear.”
“What?”
“I was just noticing how handsome you look in the morning, Mr. Ennock, even when you’re all dirty and tousled. Or maybe it’s
Without a thought, he gave her one. It was distinctly odd, kissing Alice with a heavy wrench in one hand and rich bread in the other. It felt decadent, something a prince might do. When they parted, he held the bread up to her mouth, and she took a languorous bite. Her lips grazed across his fingers, and her soft tongue brushed his knuckle. A shudder coursed over Gavin, and he was suddenly very glad to be kneeling.
“I’m in a bachelor’s workshop without a chaperone,” Alice murmured. “How wicked am I?”
“Very wicked,” he said hoarsely.
Her hand ran up the length of his thigh. Blood sang in Gavin’s ears. He very nearly threw the wrench aside and snatched her to him. Instead, carefully setting tool and food down, he touched her face, then her hair, then her shoulders. He left a smear of grease on her cheek. She guided his hand lower until it was on her breast, and she gasped as he pressed its warmth beneath his palm.
The barn door snapped open. Gavin snatched his hand away. Kemp entered the barn and strode up the ramp to the gondola, a largish book bound in leather tucked under his arm. “Madam, I believe this is the volume you were looking for.”
Alice recovered quickly and accepted the book as if she and Gavin were sitting in a library. “Thank you, Kemp.”
“Shall I clear that tray away for you, Sir?” Kemp asked Gavin.
Gavin shot him a hard look. “I’m still eating, thanks.”
Kemp nodded with a faint creak and left. Gavin poured himself some tea to cover his consternation. “What is it you figured out?” he asked.
Alice was already paging through the book. “Just this. Phipps still won’t let me near Aunt Edwina, so I don’t know for sure how Aunt Edwina is doing at the moment, but she didn’t seem to be in the final stages of clockworker madness. That’s why it bothered me, the way she kept telling me to play ma que with the Queen. So I went down to the library. Mrs. Babbage was very helpful, actually.”
“And what did you find?”
“This.” She turned the book so he could see a color plate with a series of tiles made of what looked like ivory. Each had an Oriental character painted on it. “It’s a game.”
“I’ve never heard of it.”
“No one has, really. It comes from China. It has a lot of names: ma que, mu tsian, ma jiang, even mah jong.
