Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

plank floor of the room, with newfound respect. “P’raps it will find summat more’n dirt on t’other floor, too. Best we stick by it.”
    Claire divided half of Luke’s ill-gotten gains among everyone in the house—which proved to be an excellent lesson in arithmetic for Jake and Tigg, who led the effort. “I shall take the other half to the bank,” she told Snouts privately, “and invest it in the railroads and the Royal Society of Engineers until we decide what to do with it. Personally, I think we should give it to the Society for the Protection of War Widows and Orphans. I am quite sure Mr. Jackson was responsible for the poverty of at least some of them.”
    He gave her a doubtful look. “You’ll ’ave an ’ard time convincin’ this lot the widows an’ orphans deserve it more than they do. They’ll just think you stole it.”
    She raised her chin. “I shan’t tolerate having my motives questioned. They have seen how fairly I deal. They will just have to trust me. Besides, none of this is really ours, Snouts. We have stolen it, not to put too fine a point on things.”
    “Spoils of war, Lady,” he told her roughly. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. At least this roof don’t leak, an’ there’s enough artillery in the cellar to hold off anyone who disagrees wiv’ us for a month should it come to that.”
    “It will not. We will not give the criminals and thieves of London any competition. We shall set our sights on a different arena entirely.”
    With the comforting weight of money in her skirt pocket, she hired a carter with a steam-powered dray and returned to Wilton Crescent. It stood just as she’d left it, except that the note was missing from the sink, as was everything but the bedstead in Mrs. Morven’s room. Ah. That worthy lady must have relocated to Lord James’s establishment. At least she would be safe there. Claire directed the carter and his burly boy to load up every single other thing left in the house, including the bedstead, the linens, and the piano.
    What of Gorse, then? He must have gone to the Wellesleys. Claire added Send tubes to Gorse and Mrs. Morven to the mental list that included See Mr. Arundel about who owns the cottage and Eat something . The cottage in Vauxhall Gardens might not be much, but it possessed a vacuum tube. With that, she could communicate and keep a tenuous thread connecting herself with her old world.
    Claire had been trained practically since infancy in how to run a household. Or to be more accurate, her mother had led by example and Claire had taken refuge in books and experiments. She regretted now that she had not paid more attention to the practice of housewifery. Of course, the art of drawing up the menu for a dinner party of eighteen was slightly different from arranging the trip to market that would result in the production of food on the table for the same number. She doubted that Lady St. Ives had ever been to market in her life, much less in the company of a gang of cutpurses and street children who saw no harm in lifting an orange if they could get away with it. In their view, the sin lay in being caught.
    But at the very least, writing out the list of items to be purchased each day gave the Mopsies practice in their letters, and each of them possessed such a sharp mind that they were never shorted by so much as a penny during the actual purchase.
    The boy who had been so scornful of Snouts on the night they’d claimed the house—who introduced himself to Claire as Lewis but was called Loser by everyone else—proved to be a helpful ally once he realized that the Lady meant business and tolerated no nonsense. The disloyal were invited to leave, and as her reputation spread, the number of volunteers knocking at the river door became rather gratifying. Lewis flushed an ancient crone out of the warren of streets whom he claimed to be his grandmother. She may have moved at the pace of a stick insect, but she could cook, and as long as the larder was kept stocked, meals appeared at more or less regular intervals. They had no table to put them on at first, but one evening four of the boys came puffing along the bridge above the house bearing a ten-foot dining table that they claimed had fallen out of a boat. Claire closed her eyes and beckoned them in, and the table became headquarters for the poker players when it was off duty.
    A full stomach and productive activity went a long way to ensuring the loyalty of the last