Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

robbers’ hideout?” The boy frowned. Too many questions. She tried again. “They’ve brought my things here?” He nodded. “Are they friends of yours?” He nodded again.
    Here was a puzzle. She squatted next to him in the shadow of the neighboring warehouse. “But my little man, if they’re friends of yours, why have you showed me? I’ve said I’ll bring the bobbies down on them. Is it because they’ve hurt you?”
    He shook his head so vigorously his matted hair swung straight out above his ears. He took her hand and pointed to the ramshackle place, smiling in a way that she could only interpret as encouraging.
    “You want me to go in there?” Big nod. “By myself?” He thrust out his chest and planted his feet as though he were a captain surveying the quarterdeck. “Well yes, I know you’re with me, but you probably couldn’t stop them coshing me on the head a second time the moment they caught sight of me. All I want is to get my things back. Do you know where they might have put the landau?”
    Confusion wrote itself all over the smooth but filthy features.
    “Never mind. I shall find it.” She rose, the muscles on her right side—the ones that had unceremoniously met the street as she was pulled from the landau—aching with the effort. “And since I haven’t seen a member of Sir Robert Peel’s policing force in the last hour, I must conclude I’m on my own.”
    Claire surveyed the building, which leaned against the warehouse next door like a drunk against his best friend. Rage bubbled just beneath her breastbone. How dared they take the clothes literally off her back? How dared anyone treat her like this? It wasn’t enough that a mob had invaded her home and caused her to run for her very life. It wasn’t enough that her father had made the poor decisions that had opened her up to this. But this scum—these ruffians—had taken everything she had in the world, everything that would have made it possible for her to make her own way. Without respectable clothes and the landau, she could not convince anyone she was worthy of employment, much less gently bred.
    These wretches had stolen her future from her, and by all she held holy, she would not tolerate it. She was finished with apologizing and hiding and running away. It was time to stand up and impose her will on someone else for once in her life.
    “I’ll be back in an hour,” she told the youngster still standing beside her, waiting for her to go skipping into that house to have tea and crumpets with his criminal friends. “And if you would be so kind as to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of my landau and meet me out here, I promise I will not involve you in what I’m about to do.”
    The child’s eyes widened and he released her skirt as if it burned him.
    She marched down the street, picked up her skirts, and took to her heels in the alley. The last trains ran at eleven o’clock. If she was lucky, she could steal a ride on one and get to the laboratory at St. Cecelia’s and back before an Underground conductor caught her without a ticket.

Chapter 15

    No one occupied the Underground train carriage but two middle-aged charwomen more interested in their own gossip than in what a young lady was doing unaccompanied on a train in the middle of the night. Claire sidled off at Victoria Station, ticketless but unaccosted, and took a shortcut through Eaton Square to the back gate of St. Cecelia’s. The administration fondly thought that their property was secure, but the students knew better.
    Claire found the foot- and handholds worn into the wall behind the glossy curtain of ivy and clambered up and over in moments. From there it was a quick dash across the lawn and down the basement steps, where skillful application of a hairpin to the lock made the way plain.
    The stairs were as dark as criminal activity required them to be, though Claire kept a firm hold on the rail. The last thing she needed was to miss her footing and tumble to the bottom.
    Ah. The Chemistry of the Home laboratory.
    She found the jar of lucifers Professor Grünwald kept next to his blotter for the purpose of lighting a forbidden cigar during the lunch hour, and by their light set to work. It took a few moments to dredge up the recipe from the recesses of memory—blast the thieves for taking her notebook!—but within a quarter hour she had four vials stoppered and ready to go. Some day, when she was famous and once again rich, she would make an