Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

spooked horses and impatient young men coming in the other direction. She collected hoots and greetings from one or two of these, but as long as they weren’t swearing at her for cutting them off, she was content to blissfully ignore their shouts for her attention.
    Not many women knew how to pilot an engine, much less one as pretty as her father’s.
    And not only pilot it, but suss out the secrets of its operation. Every Saturday morning while the household slept, she and Gorse would examine the inner workings under the landau’s gleaming covers. She learned how to fill the coal hopper and top up the boiler. How to clean out the piping and grease the hard-working pistons. She even learned how to balance the delicate platforms that took the weight of coal and water and informed the gauges how much each contained.
    Gorse, being a man of intellect and inner resources, knew as much about the physics of steam as any professor at St. Cecelia’s. “My grandmother’s first cousin on her father’s side was Richard Trevithick, the great Cornish engineer,” he’d told her one day at the beginning of their secret association. “Engineering runs in our family, you might say. I’d rather tinker with this fine piece of work than run one of his lordship’s tin mines, and that’s a fact.”
    Claire deeply regretted the inanity of St. Cecelia’s curriculum, which dictated that young ladies should learn dancing, deportment, languages, and the chemistry of the kitchen and cookery rather than practical things like engineering and the operation of steam engines. Who cared how the cake rose? It would do so despite your knowledge of its chemistry, as long as you put the right ingredients into it and applied the right amount of heat. Getting oneself around the country under one’s own power—flying upon the ground at the speed of the wind itself—now, that was something worth teaching.
    But of course her opinion signified nothing, at school or at home.
    A block from Wilton Crescent, the elegant street in Belgravia where Carrick House was situated, she piloted the landau to a grassy verge, where the tracks of wheels told the educated eye this was where such an engine had stopped before. Divesting herself of her driving rig, she and Gorse exchanged places and a few minutes later, arrived with the utmost decorum at the shiny black rear doors of Viscount and Lady St. Ives’ home while in town.
    “Thank you, Gorse. See you tomorrow.”
    “Yes, miss. And may I say, well done.”
    Glowing, she climbed the scrubbed steps and let herself into the rear hall. To her right, swinging doors opened into the kitchens, already bustling with preparations for dinner, which was served precisely at eight on the evenings her parents were at home. To her left were offices and the quarters of the senior staff. The housemaids had their rooms on the fourth floor. She climbed the stairs to the second level, where cool marble floors gleamed and the scents of wax and the freesias in their Chinese vase on the hall table greeted her in a silent benediction.
    There was much to be said for silence. Perhaps Mama had not yet returned from paying her afternoon calls.
    “Claire? Is that you?”
    Claire’s chest deflated in a sigh. It had been too much to hope that she could escape to her room unnoticed. “Yes, Mama.”
    “I wish to speak to you. In the morning room, please.” The tightness in her mother’s tone was her first warning. Like the yellow arc on the pressure gauge, it indicated that if something were not done immediately, the consequences could be dire.
    The happy glow of a fine afternoon’s drive faded. In point of fact, the second brightest spot in this otherwise dreadful day had been the explosion.
    Which she had no doubt at all was to be the subject of the next quarter of an hour.

Chapter 3

    Lady St. Ives sat upon the forest-green brocade couch, its width sufficient to accommodate the bustles and petticoats of the fashionable, in the forefront of which she maintained a dashing lead. Her navy-and-white striped silk skirts were overlaid by a polonaise of navy damask trimmed in gold ruching, and gold rosettes drew the eye to a square neckline and the statuesque figure that was the envy of many a dumpier matron.
    The fact that Claire had inherited her father’s height but not her mother’s figure, her father’s unruly auburn mane and not her mother’s blonde curls, was a continuing source of despair. Only in the last year or two had