Magnificent Devices 01 - Lady of Devices

and keeping her mother from marrying her off, she can almost forget that a powerful lord wants to get closer ... and if he succeeds, can destroy it all with a single word ...

Excerpt: Her Own Devices
    Magnificent Devices, Book 2
    Copyright 2011 Shelley Adina Bates

    Chapter 1

    London, August 1889

    They were too small to be airships, and too ephemeral to be bombs. Glowing with a gentle orange light, each the size of a lantern, they floated up into the night sky powered by a single candle and the most delicate of tiny engines.
    One didn’t, after all, simply release such dangerous things without a means of directing where they were to go.
    “They’re so pretty,” Maggie breathed.
    “Sh!” Her twin sister Lizzie, both of them having no surname that anyone knew, nudged her with urgency. “T’Lady said to be quiet.”
    “You be quiet! Since when d’you listen to the Lady at the best o’ times?”
    “Mopsies!” Lady Claire Trevelyan, sister of a viscount, formerly a resident of Belgravia and now a resident of a hideout in Vauxhall gained at the price of a brigand’s life, glared at both girls. They’d been on many a night lookout. What were they thinking, to risk giving away their position by whispering?
    Though Claire had to admit that the beauty of the balloons’ dreamy flight hid the fact that she, Jake, and Tigg had constructed them out of a rag picker’s findings: a silk chemise, a ragged nightgown so fine she could draw it through her grandmother’s emerald ring, a pair of bloomers that a very broad lady had thrown away because of a tear she was too wealthy to mend.
    Add to this a little device Claire had been working on that would act as a steering and propulsion mechanism, and you had a set of silent intruders that could go where she and her accomplices could not.
    Hunching their shoulders at the reproof, the girls settled behind the tumbledown remains of a churchyard wall to watch the half-dozen balloons sail away with their cargo over the width of a street and up over a two-story stone wall as impregnable as a medieval keep.
    The spider takes hold with her hands, and is in kings’ palaces . Well, tonight she was the spider and the inhabitants of “The Cudgel” Bonaventure’s fortress were about to learn a lesson in manners. One did not jump the associates of the Lady in the street and relieve them of the rewards of their night’s work in the gambling parlors without reprisal. The candles that caused the balloons to rise would not set his fortress on fire, but the chemical suspended in a single vial from each certainly would.
    An owl hooted, rather more cheerfully than one might expect. “They’re over the wall,” Snouts McTavish translated. “We can move in when you give the word, Lady.”
    “I think it will be safe to wait for Mr. Bonaventure in the street. Jake, do you have the gaseous capsaicin devices should he prove foolish?”
    “Aye.”
    She had known Jake for several weeks. Even now, she was not sure he wouldn’t use such a device on her and challenge Snouts for lieutenancy of their little band of the abandoned and neglected. However, if someone were to prove himself trustworthy, he must perforce be trusted. Leaving him in charge of the satchel with its clinking contents was a calculated risk, but it was one she must take. Especially since he had compounded the devices himself.
    “Right, then. Let us offer advice to the distressed and homeless, shall we?”
    The glow over the wall was bright enough to light their way into the street as the buildings behind it caught fire. The contents of each vial suspended beneath its balloon had ignited on contact with air as the candles burned out and they dropped out of flight, higgledy-piggledy all over the roof of The Cudgel’s headquarters. Wood that had been dried out during the hot summer—old wood, that had been standing since long before their glorious Queen’s time—ignited and in seconds the oldest part of the building had gone up like a Roman candle.
    Claire regretted the loss of the steering mechanisms—a particularly nice bit of engineering she was quite proud of—but at least they had gone in a good cause.
    The Cudgel would think twice before picking on her friends again.
    The entire house was engulfed in roaring flame by the time the single gate creaked open and a small crowd of men and boys tumbled through it, gasping and slapping smoldering sparks and holding bits of clothing over their faces against the