It was a very roomy carriage. It held Charlotte, and all the luggage that wouldn’t fit in the boot, and the huge Baron besides, with room left over. But it was very, very full of Baron by about ten silent minutes into the ride.
A gloomy, thoughtful Baron, Charlotte discovered, took up even more space. She had grown accustomed to his deep, gentle voice and the surprisingly witty banter that had sprung up between them. She had grown accustomed to his attention too, she realized, even though she was scarcely entitled to it. It was petty of her to miss it. Why should he dance attendance on her here, after all? There was nobody else to see them now.
“I think it was a successful event,” she finally ventured when she could tolerate the quiet no longer. Her champagne had long since worn off, and the butterflies had resumed their ominous flapping beneath her ribcage.
“Yes.”
Another few minutes passed, feeling like hours. Charlotte discovered she was wringing her hands, and she stripped her gloves off to give her something to do.
“Have you stayed at the Regent Arms before?” she asked.
Dexter frowned, shook his head and resumed staring out the window.
“I hear it’s lovely.”
“Of course it’s lovely,” he concurred.
“Well. Yes.” Their set—Charlotte’s former set, at least, and the set to which Hardison belonged by birth if not by choice—would not stay at hotels that were not lovely. Charlotte couldn’t help the note of bitterness that crept into her voice when she added, ”The time to rethink your choice would have been sometime before today.”
This time he actually looked at her, as if noticing her in the vehicle for the first time, and Charlotte thought she would rather have held her tongue than bear that scrutiny.
“I’m not having second thoughts. But I admit I’m wondering how this is all going to proceed. The ship, everything. I’ve so little training for this sort of thing. And I’m worried about what will happen to my workshop in my absence. Whether they’ll manage all right without me. I’ve never taken a holiday before.”
His workshop. His life’s work. She forgot so easily how important it was to him, how integral he was to its daily workings. He might be a baron, but he operated like an industrialist who’d learned the business from the ground up. His decision to conduct his affairs that way was as unfamiliar to Charlotte as a poorly run hotel. His anxiety was just as foreign to her.
“Young Mr. Pence seems very competent.”
“He is competent. He’s also very young.”
“Well . . .” She tried, and failed, to think of something comforting to say. “It will only be for a few months at most.”
“I appointed him my heir, you know. In case I don’t return. I thought . . .” His eyes returned to the window, which was lightening as they neared the city, with its eternal gaslights and numerous vehicles.
He was leaving his life’s work behind, while she was traveling toward hers. Or so Charlotte fervently hoped. That there, in France, she would finally know the feeling of accomplishment, that sense of who she was, that had eluded her for so long.
She only had first to pretend to be a giddy young baroness bride for a few months, keep her dinner down long enough to fly her airship successfully over hostile French territory, determine the nature and extent of a potential plot to rekindle the war with a weapon that could destroy them all . . . and hope that her new husband managed to acquit himself well as a rich dilettante while solving a few unsolvable problems of aquatic engineering in the meantime.
Charlotte looked out the window, wondering whether something out there might calm her down or at least engage her interest, as it seemed to have engaged the Baron’s. She saw the night, the increasing flow of traffic and the frenetic glare of the approaching city. And reflected in the glass, just visible from the corner of her eye, there was the profile of a man she hardly knew, but knew she must not want as she did.
The man with whom she would be sharing a stateroom on the ocean liner Alberta for the next two weeks, and a series of French hotel rooms for an as-yet-undetermined number of weeks following that.
Her husband.
Six
LE HAVRE, FRANCE, AND THE OCEAN LINER ALBERTA, EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO LE HAVRE
MARTIN’S SHOULDER AND elbow always ached when it rained. He watched the gathering clouds from the arched window of Dubois’s office, anticipating the drop in barometric pressure that would soon make its presence known as a slow, dense agony in those joints.
At least the new ceramic coating kept the arm from freezing in the winter now. The added weight might be hastening the decay of his beleaguered joints and muscles, but he considered that a small price to pay. He did miss morphine on days like this, though. He was no longer in government service, so he was unlikely to be found out for using it, and Dubois certainly paid him more than enough to afford it. But Martin knew he couldn’t take the risk of becoming dependent on the stuff again.
“You’ll take point,” Dubois said. “Your usual team can deal with the particulars, find out their itinerary and so forth. This may mean it’s time to increase the pressure on Murcheson. We can’t afford his competition in this steamrail bid.”
Glancing at his employer, Martin had to stifle a sneer. The man had once looked like the influential, powerful captain of industry he fancied himself. Now he had let himself go and it was even more apparent he was, at his core, a glutton and a slob. A dab of butter sullied his cravat, and now he was adding to the mess with a bar of chocolate. The meager sunlight glinted off the scalp that showed between his dyed strands of hair.
“What is the man’s name again?” he asked.
“Hardison. The Makesmith Baron, this Dominion rat who makes the steam cars and the, the”—he gestured around his body and then pantomimed firing a weapon—“for the house parties.”
“Fowling harness,” Martin offered in English. Dubois waved an impatient hand at him.
“The honeymoon is a convenient excuse for him to join forces with Murcheson. I’m sure of this. Each can use the other to secure intercontinental trade. Combining resources would make them impossibly strong in the bidding process for the steamrail contract. It cannot be allowed. I must win the bid, Martin.”
“Oui.”
It was always so with Dubois, always a drama about the dire necessity of quelling this or that competing business interest. Always about the money he wasn’t earning, and rarely about the assets he already held. He had probably engaged in more intrigue in his private business dealings than he ever had during his brief youthful tenure in French intelligence. Even his outdated post-royalist political leanings were based on finding what he considered to be the easiest route to a greater profit margin—rekindling hostilities with the British, so he could resume his wartime practice of milking the French government for lucrative defense manufacturing contracts. He often bemoaned the fact that the French had never developed a doomsday device, something that might have kept the war going indefinitely, just so he could make more money. Dubois was the worst sort of privateer, with no political or moral compass to steer him from greed.
Others in France, of course, had more wide-ranging reasons to desire such a device—at least before the treaty, when it first became clear the British had developed one of their own. That was the weapon Martin had lost the stolen designs for, ensuring that the antitreaty elements in the old French government had no basis to argue against accepting the terms the British offered for ending the war. Fear of that device—lack of any way to counter it—was one of the prime reasons the French had agreed to sign the Treaty of Calais.