Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

leather apron off. His body felt strangely light without its familiar protective weight. “Come. I will pour us each a drink and you can tell me about this girl.”
    The thick planks of the loft floor sounded hollow under their feet as they walked to Andrew’s spacious office with its single skylight, its ocular aperture filled now with a frosting of stars. He lit both lamps on the desk and rolled up a set of drawings for the compression chamber to make room for the bottle and two glasses from the sideboard.
    James poured slightly more than two fingers of Glenlivet and handed it to Andrew. “You look as though you need it, after such a disappointment.”
    The fiery liquor burned its way down with the fierceness of regret. “I will recover, and, as you say, have another go. But enough of that. I am happy your supper party was a success. Particularly since I had to talk you into it.”
    “The company of simpering schoolgirls is not usually to my taste,” James admitted. “But they are to graduate next week, and be presented the week after. I look upon it rather as a preview showing, without the tedious competition of all the other young bucks. Blatchley is family, of course, and Bryce is civil enough. Between the two of them they make one active human brain.”
    Andrew snorted with laughter and the whiskey went down sideways, causing him to cough. “Bloods, are they?” he inquired when he recovered.
    “Tiresomely so. My esteemed cousin is not even aware there is an expedition returning from the Amazon, much less who leads it. And to Bryce, an airship has less meaning passing overhead than a cloud. He views it not as the crowning achievement of human engineering, but simply as something that gets in the way.”
    “Until he wants to go to Paris.” Andrew admired the lamplight through the peat-colored lens of the whiskey. “Then he might view it differently.”
    “Not he. A coach and a ferry, I’m afraid.”
    Andrew made a face. “Poor man. Imagine living inside his skull.”
    “I cannot. Let us return to a happier topic—the ladies. Miss Peony Churchill is a pistol.”
    “I thought it was the Honorable you were interested in.”
    “Andrew, you benighted sod, there are girls you look at with an eye to marriage, and girls you look at simply with an eye. For the sheer pleasure of it.”
    Andrew frowned. “I would not say that in Mrs. Stanley Churchill’s hearing. You’ll find yourself cleft in two by one of the foreign blades they say she collects.”
    “I kept my thoughts to myself, never fear. But the baggage is a toothsome eyeful, and that’s a fact.”
    “James, your mother must be rolling in her grave. Do not say such things about a young lady of such a brilliant family.”
    “She is going to be just like her fearsome mother, I tell you. And if a lady does not want to be talked of or looked at, she should not lead such a public life.”
    Since when did a life led in the pursuit of knowledge entitle one to be sniggered at like a Whitechapel doxy? “I will not have you speak of Peony or of Mrs. Churchill that way. You know as well as I the latter is a champion of scientific inquiry, and she has the ear of the Prime Minister as well. We would be lucky to attract her notice, James. Why, a word from her could open doors throughout the ranks of better placed—and better funded—men than we.”
    James had the grace to look abashed. “You are right. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat and poured himself another finger. “But the fact is that Miss Churchill is a most unusual girl. The Wellesley girl and that horse-faced Montrose chit paled in comparison. Looking at the two of them I was reminded of nothing more than a row of meringues, baked in pastel colors and put on display in a confectioner’s case.”
    “But the St. Ives girl? She is not a meringue? I confess I’ve not heard of her or seen her out in company.” Andrew welcomed the turn of the conversation back into more normal channels. He and James disagreed often in matters of physics or chemistry or philosophy, but not in matters of the heart.
    Come to think of it, he could not remember ever having discussed matters of the heart with him before. A strange and sensitive topic, to be sure, and one not amenable to the tromping feet of careless and inexperienced men. Surely such territory belonged to women better equipped to explore it.
    “You? Go out in company?” James scoffed. “If a lady doesn’t come to a lecture or take a