Chapter 34
The evening passed with merry storytelling, recounting of past races and liberal amounts of Spanish wine.
Lucy marvelled at how rare and exhilarating it was, not only to talk freely about her topics of inclination, but also to have her knowledge treated with respect.
The tension she had felt at Dashwood’s proximity seemed to fade as she became more settled in her own skin.
She doubted she could have achieved such comfort without his presence by her side, and as the night moved on she found herself, eyes closed, not retreating into her mind but absorbing the world around her; the warmth of the fire, the chatter of voices and the weight of his shoulder as she leaned in towards him.
‘Lucy?’
She opened her eyes, straightening up and looking into his face, eyes reflecting firelight. As ever, she could not interpret his subtle expression. But how remarkable it was that she felt no need to do so.
‘I think,’ he said softly, ‘it might be time for you to retire for the night, Miss Elliot. Tomorrow will be a busy day.’
The sun had long faded, and the woodland shadows were beginning to overcome the glow of the fire.
Dashwood proffered his arm to accompany Lucy as Elsa led her to a small stone hut, walls overgrown with vines but topped with a well-tended thatched roof.
Perhaps it had once been a guard post or a storeroom.
Inside was a small space with a wooden bed, a straw mattress and a table.
Elsa hung a lantern on a hook and stepped outside, leaning against a wall, arms folded. As many a pretence as the racers had layered to bring their guests there, it was clear the Swiss woman held her duty as chaperone with utmost severity.
‘I trust you will be comfortable enough for the night?’ Dashwood asked politely.
‘Yes, of course,’ Lucy said. ‘This will be perfectly sufficient.’ It was, without doubt, the most modest sleeping arrangement Lucy had ever experienced. And yet she found herself suddenly so tired all she wanted was to curl up and sleep.
‘Goodnight, James,’ she said drowsily, quite tired or content enough to forget the propriety of names.
In the silence that followed, she looked up to see him watching her with the strangest expression on his face.
Then he seemed to catch himself, cleared his throat and replied, ‘Goodnight, Lucy.’ And then he turned and walked back across the camp.
While she herself was weary, she marvelled that he seemed to walk with a sudden and lively spring in his step.
She closed the door and turned to the bed. After such a long and unusual day, and more wine than she was accustomed to, sleep easily overcame Lucy Elliot.
She woke somewhat later than usual, barring the mornings after the Night Races.
She arose and changed into her simpler dress, suspecting that her fine travelling garments would be ill-suited to the day.
She hoped no one at Atherton would give too close a thought to her clothes smelling of a campfire.
When she walked outside into the morning light, the sun was already high enough to be brightening sections of the broad clearing.
Here and there she caught sight of the daily routine of the settlement.
Hekili was gardening, diligently plucking out weeds from among the vegetables.
Elsa was working a contraption by the stream that involved turning a box with a crank.
Dashwood and Torres were by the firepit, which had been turned over and rekindled, and was now being used to roast a bird on a spit.
Of the group, only Ulcha seemed to be absent, possibly elsewhere or still in her room.
‘Good morning, Senorita Elliot. You are just in time for roast pheasant. A fine morning’s hunting.’
‘Well,’ Dashwood noted casually, ‘this is Crown land. Technically it was poaching.’
‘Fair enough. If the King comes looking for his bird, I’ll replace it.’
Lucy was slightly shocked by so jovial a comment and yet Dashwood seemed quite at home with it. Perhaps it was an army thing. Besides, she could hardly maintain her sensibilities when her stomach rumbled at the fresh, fire-roasted breakfast.
Torres, sitting on a bench quietly, watched her as she approached.
‘Captain Dashwood, I understand,’ he said. ‘But how is it that a lady like yourself has such an eye for coaches?’
‘I am … of a curious disposition. Since my youngest days I have been inclined to order and precision. There is an elegance in putting things right that I have always revelled in, in many ways to the detriment of other perceptions.’
‘Other perceptions?’
She recounted to him what she had previously expounded to Captain Dashwood: her challenge with the reading of others, preferring instead the calculable and quantifiable.
‘So you see, I am quite unique in my ways of thought.’
‘Perhaps not as greatly as you would believe,’ came the accented voice of Elsa Reinhardt as she joined them.
‘I wondered yesterday if it might be the case. You remind me of my older brother. He has an exceptional mind. I saw him put a watch back together the first time he saw my father take it apart. He can look inside a clock and know in a moment what is wrong and what must be done to fix it. It is more than study. He sees the working in his mind. Yet whenever anyone outside the family ever visited, he would hide in his room.’
‘Did he ever say why?’
‘No.’ Elsa smiled sadly. ‘He has never said a word in his life. I wonder about him. Had he not been the son of a clockmaker, would it have been music? Needlepoint? Perhaps he could have been the son of a farmer, mute and doing no more than cutting wood all day. A genius never given form. There are stranger minds than yours. And there are worse things than coaches to be drawn to.’
‘Perhaps. But it is hardly an acceptable pastime for a lady of my position.’
‘And yet here you are.’ Elsa laughed. ‘With the approval of your family, no less. Perhaps not to the precise circumstances, but certainly to the visit to Reinhardt and Co., Engineers. It may not be right for Miss Elliot of Atherton, but I dare say it suits Lucy rather well.’
Lucy found herself in resigned agreement. Twice during the conversation she’d glanced over at the coaches with a lingering curiosity. And once at Captain Dashwood.
But let’s not think too much about that, she scolded herself.
By early afternoon, as Lucy had anticipated, her dress was quite beyond saving.
Though blankets were laid, the constant kneeling, crouching and sliding beneath the coaches had taken a hefty toll on the already aged fabric.
But Lucy was quite oblivious to it, absorbed as she was in the mechanical world.
There were four coaches in the camp: Captain Dashwood’s; Torres’s modular coach, which had brought her there; the weathered army coach Torres had won in their first race; and a smaller phaeton, stripped back to bare basics.
The latter was a project of Elsa’s, stemming from a desire to build something small and incredibly fast.
‘Imagine,’ she explained, ‘a coach that could travel as fast as a galloping horse. One with so little weight and drag that it was hardly there at all.’
‘With such a conveyance,’ Dashwood inquired, ‘would it not be more efficient simply to ride a horse?’
‘Efficient perhaps,’ she said. ‘But you overlook the thrill of the challenge.’
‘Are those sails?’ Lucy asked, wondering at some collapsed piles of dark fabric.
‘My attempts at a land yacht. Like a small sailboat. It’s been effective on a beach, but as you can imagine, it’s not overly practical on the roads.’
Such an idea had never occurred to Lucy, and it was to be the first of many discoveries for her.
As they examined the coaches, every board, every point and connection, Lucy found herself learning from someone for the first time in many years.
Most of what she knew she had drawn from books.
Out here she was learning things that no book taught.
A mathematical table might calculate a stress load, but the Swiss woman taught Lucy how to hear it.
How to see a gear slipping. To feel an axle turning and know the rate of revolution.
And as they talked, Lucy realised that Elsa possessed something she had long envied in others and lamented lacking in herself.
Instinct.
But there and then, talking to an expert, she began to perceive her instincts better than ever before. She could see the end of the process being described even before it was completed. She could see potential.
Sometimes Elsa sighed at Lucy’s suggestions and explained why they would never work in practice.
Other times, she was intrigued, hastily making notes in a foreign longhand on the pages of a small notebook.
Instinct could jump you to the right or the wrong conclusions, but tempered by knowledge, it could lead to inspired invention.
This was the world Lucy now found herself swimming in. She dived in and she dived deep.
‘No, Lucy.’ Elsa sighed wearily. ‘You cannot remove the rein brace to adjust for less weight.’
‘Why ever not? It seems most—’
‘Because it is two in the afternoon and I am hungry.’
Lucy was sceptical of this announcement, until a pocket watch was produced to demonstrate its accuracy. She realised that in the future she should not argue the time with the daughter of a Swiss clockmaker.
It appeared she had been so caught up in her interests that the time had passed without her mind or her stomach noticing.
Resisting the urge to tinker with one last part, she joined Elsa, who was now seated beside the stream, slicing bread and cheese.
As she waited for her share, she noticed Ulcha for the first time, emerging from a hut.
‘She sleeps most of the day,’ Elsa explained. ‘A night creature.’
‘She is … most unusual,’ Lucy noted, in full acknowledgement of her present company.
Elsa nodded, passing her guest a slice of bread and cheese, and a mug of water. ‘She’s not like my brother, you know. Or like you. She wasn’t born that way.’
‘If it is not proper for me to know her story—’
‘It is not a secret. She just won’t tell you. We’ve barely spoken more than a few words in years. She speaks to Dante a little more. What I know I learned from him, and even that is only pieces. You know she’s Irish?’
Lucy nodded, watching as the dark-haired woman disappeared silently into the woods.
‘What do you know of the rebellion of 1798?’
‘Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, there was an uprising against the British,’ Elsa began.
‘It went down about as well as you might expect. The rebels got squeezed back, some to a little village on the coast. They knew the Crown was coming. Leaving by sea meant the ships would catch them, so they decided to stay and fight. But one man, a fisherman, sent out his daughter on a small fishing float, on a line off the beach. He told her to keep her head down and stay silent no matter what happened. She would have heard the attack, and what came after. They burned that village to the ground, and she kept silent and kept down, even when they cut the fishing line and she started drifting out to sea. It must have taken days to drift across St George’s Channel.
By day she hid. By night she paddled. Eventually she was picked up by a Welsh patrol.
Of course they didn’t know who she was. She didn’t speak so there was no accent to go by.
She became a thief. On the darkest night she could walk as well as if it were day.
One night she tried to steal from Dante’s coach.
Maybe he saw someone with talent. Maybe someone to save.
Maybe just an outsider in search of a family to replace the one she had lost.’
Finishing her tale, Elsa bit into her cheese and bread.
Lucy wiped her face, considering the story. With such a history, the Irish girl would have no love for the Crown. But would losing family in such a way be sufficient to steer someone to hijack army coaches?
‘There are servants at Atherton,’ she thought aloud. ‘I have never once entertained the idea of being without them. Or the grounds. Or my family. There are so many who have so little and yet they must suffer losing even that.’
Elsa nodded. ‘Some think our minds are elevated from the world around us, but I am not so sure.’ She lifted a small stone and dropped it into the stream.
‘If the stone had not wished to fall, it would have made no difference. The position we start in, the forces upon us, are as inevitable as the laws of motion.’
‘But we make our own choices, surely?’
‘Perhaps. My point is that you cannot change the place where you begin or what comes from it. But we may do what we can to make a better world for those around us.’
‘If our choices are predetermined, what use is there in trying such?’
‘If they are predetermined, then I can hardly do otherwise.’ The Swiss woman smiled.
‘I dare say you and my sister should have an excellent philosophical discussion,’ said Lucy.
‘Our worlds are not the same. You are welcome in my home. I fear I should not be welcome in yours.’
Lucy reluctantly agreed, eating her small meal in silence. When she had finished, another question occurred to her.
‘I know why I am here, working on the coaches. But why is Captain Dashwood here? They took a coach out this morning and have yet to return, so I may assume they have a task at hand.’
‘That, I think, is a question to be asked of your captain himself. While his attitude to class is decidedly more flexible than most of his station, it does not seem likely that he is here without purpose. That is what Dante believes.’
‘Then why host him at all? Surely the debt of dinner might be repaid more easily.’
‘A coach may travel both ways.’ Elsa shrugged. ‘He wants to learn about us, we want to learn about him. People in our position do well by finding opportunities.’
Lucy was unsure what to make of the words, but could detect no menace in them. Then again, identifying intention was not her strong suit.
The day had been so engaging that she had largely forgotten that she was far from home, outnumbered and surrounded by a group of smart and skilled people who might be thieves and murderers. The bread and cheese suddenly sat uneasily in her stomach.
Dashwood seemed confident in his ability to maintain subterfuge. The best she could do was to attempt the same.
‘Upon first meeting him, I had a similar curiosity,’ Lucy confessed.
‘You did?’
‘As you noted, he is a curious gentleman. I wondered at his intentions.’
‘And do you know them now?
‘The entirety of his intentions remain frustratingly veiled to me.’
‘I should not be surprised at that.’ Elsa chuckled, washing her hands in the stream and drying them on her coat. ‘Now then. Rein braces.’