Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

quadricycle was bad enough. You cannot tell me you are actually piloting one of those dangerous things!”
    “They’re not dangerous, if you know their proper operation. Which I do. One’s speed and direction are merely a matter of the correct application of steam. The explosions of the first models are a thing of the past.”
    “That’s lucky, knowing how you are about explosions.”
    Claire’s good spirits cooled like a fire left too long without fuel. “You heard.”
    “The entire school heard. Honestly, dear heart, you’ve got to curb this unhealthy tendency to blow things up.”
    “That ridiculous excuse for a professor wouldn’t tell us what would happen. How can I be blamed for the silly man’s stubbornness? If there’s anything I hate, it’s someone telling me ‘don’t’ without saying why.”
    “And one must know the reason why for everything.”
    “Not everything. But certainly something as simple as why one cannot add a peppermint to dandelion and burdock. One adds peppermint to cookie batter and tea with no harmful effects whatever.”
    “Thanks to you, everyone in school now knows why. And by breakfast tomorrow, everyone over at Heathbourne will, too.”
    Heathbourne was the equivalent of St. Cecelia’s on the other side of the square—and where she would have gone had she been born a boy and her father’s heir. “I don’t care about the opinions of schoolboys.”
    “You will in a few weeks, when you’re at your come-out ball at Carrick House and none of them ask you to dance.”
    “You sound exactly like my mother.” Why had no one told her the bow on the front of her middy blouse was lopsided? She pulled it out and began to retie it.
    “In this she’s correct, and you know it. Claire, please consider.” Emilie’s tone became gentle. “It’s a fact universally acknowledged that a young lady of good fortune must make a suitable marriage.”
    “Do not quote the mores of our grandmothers’ generation to me. Besides, not every young lady wishes that.” Her own appearance taken care of, she reached over to anchor a celluloid hairpin more securely in Emilie’s bun. If it could not be lovely, at least it should be secure.
    “Every one who wishes to be received in good society does. You don’t want to be one of those dreadful Chelsea people, like poor Peony Churchill, do you?”
    As a matter of fact, Claire coveted and envied the intellectual explorations found in the salons and lecture halls of the Chelsea set, known in the papers as the Wits. It was led by Mrs. Stanley Churchill, Peony’s mother, and populated by explorers and scientists from the Royal Society of Engineers as well as artists, musicians, and the most independent thinkers of Her Majesty Queen Victoria’s empire. Their philosophy that the intellect trumped the bloodline flew in the face of most of society. But no one could argue that the Prime Minister himself was one of them. The fact that a scientist or explorer could be granted lands and a title when noble bloodlines were getting more inbred and in some cases dying out altogether was an indication which way the wind blew.
    And Claire had always loved the wind. Was it mere coincidence that the family estate in Cornwall was called Gwynn Place, from the Cornish plas-an-gwyn , meaning manor of the wind ? Perhaps not. Perhaps it was a sign.
    A shadow blotted out the sun and she and Emilie looked up to see not a cloud, but an enormous airship passing far overhead. The eleven-thirty packet to Paris had left its mooring mast at Hampstead Heath exactly on time.
    Deep in the marble and sandstone halls of the school, a bell rang. “There’s lunch,” she told Emilie, turning from the wonderful sight of the ship and neatly evading the answer to her friend’s question. “Come along or we’ll be late.”

Chapter 2

    As was his habit, Gorse piloted the steam landau up to the steps in the mews behind St. Cecelia’s at precisely three-fifteen. Claire ran to meet him and waited impatiently while he set the brake and went around the front to pull open the thin brass door for her. She allowed him to hand her inside and, with a practiced eye, checked the pressure gauges, the switch positions, and the indicators that told the pilot the levels of coal and water in the boiler.
    A hopelessly old-fashioned carriage with the Wellesley family crest on the door rolled up behind them, pulled by two fine chestnuts. Claire could practically feel the stares of envy as Lady