Chapter 7 #2
Rand smiled and made his and William John’s excuses, then claimed the chair opposite Felicia.
As usual, William John sat at the head of the table, opposite Flora. Transparently released from all worries, glib and gay, he rattled on to Flora, heaping accolades on his sister’s head for her invaluable assistance.
Felicia, Rand noticed, looked pleased, but also faintly disturbed.
To fascinating and occasionally enigmatic, he could now add intriguing.
From where he sat, there was definitely more to Felicia Throgmorton than he’d had any reason to suppose.
The next day was Sunday. Rand and William John went down to the workshop immediately on returning from church.
The previous afternoon and evening, they’d worked together—Rand acting as William John’s assistant—to make the modifications Felicia had suggested. They’d had to leave the connections to harden overnight before testing the new valves.
They could barely wait to fire up the boiler.
Then they watched the gauges. Watched and waited as the pressure built.
The valve released precisely as it should. “Yes!” William John raised his fists to the ceiling.
Rand grinned, but kept watching. Only when the new valve continued to release, maintaining the pressure in the boiler at the maximum safe level, did he finally relax.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of their difficulties.
William John reattached the drive shaft—he’d dismantled it while they’d concentrated on working on the boiler—only to discover that now, although the issue with the pressure was resolved, even with a steady pressure applied, he couldn’t get the pistons to remain in strict tandem.
After five minutes of running, they were sufficiently out of rhythm to have the drive shaft groaning.
After an hour of poking at the pistons and their connections, clearing all the tubing, and then studying the diagrams, William John had once again resorted to tugging his hair.
“I don’t understand it,” he wailed. “We’ve increased the pressure, but it’s now under control and steady. The timing shouldn’t have changed.”
It occurred to Rand that, as with the earlier problem, this one was almost certainly more about design than the actual mechanism.
“Why don’t we carry on with those changes you wanted to make to the drive shaft itself and wait until your sister comes to pry us away for lunch, then see if she can suggest a way forward? ”
William John had looked ready to throw a spanner at the board. Rand’s words gave him pause, then he shrugged. “Yes—why not? We’re getting nowhere here—let’s move on to something we can do.”
When, after Johnson had struck the gong twice with no result, Felicia again made her way down the curving stairs to the workshop, it was to find William John and Rand waiting for her with welcoming smiles on their faces.
Frowning, she paused on the last stair. “What is it?”
William John leapt to tell her—in detail.
And, once again, she found herself, however reluctantly, inexorably drawn into considering, studying, and evaluating the problem.
When William John finally fell silent, and both men waited, patently expecting her to offer them a solution, she frowned at them. “Yesterday…that was very likely just luck. A fluke. A moment that won’t be repeated.”
William John looked at her beseechingly. “Please.” He gestured to the diagrams.
“We’re stuck.” Rand’s tone was less cajoling and more definite. “You’re here, you understand the problem—just look and see if anything strikes you.”
She humphed, but consented to fix her attention once more on the diagrams. The more she traced the connections, the more she felt as if her mind was sinking into the structure of the engine, making sense of the complexity in a way that was almost beyond her conscious grasp.
As if some deeply buried part of her recognized the challenge and rose to meet it.
This difficulty was…trickier. There were more possibilities, more points at which things might be going awry.
She lost all sense of time as, with her eyes, she traced, tracked, and backtracked.
As if from a distance, she heard slow, ponderous footsteps on the stairs, heard Flora’s voice raised in a question that cut off when Rand said something.
She almost smiled as she realized what she was doing—that she was just like her father and brother in being able to cut herself, her mind, off from everything around her…
She used to consider that a flaw. Now…
She blinked, looked more intently, then she stepped closer to the board, swiftly ran through her thoughts once again, then with a fingertip, she tapped each of the four feed lines to the pistons.
“These are the source of your problem—you haven’t equalized the lines.
The pressure going into each is equal, but because the lines are different lengths, the pressure delivered to the pistons is fractionally different.
It didn’t matter, at least not so much, when you were running with much less power.
Now you’ve increased the power, the pistons will be noticeably out of time after even a relatively short run. ”
She turned to William John and saw his eyes widening, widening, then a huge grin split his face.
He beamed at her. “You’ve done it again!”
She found herself grinning back. She glanced at Rand and saw him grinning, too, transparently relieved and delighted. An undeniable spurt of triumph rose and washed through her.
William John was muttering, then Flora harrumphed and said, “I’m very glad you’ve worked out your problem, but luncheon is still waiting. At least it’s a cold collation and won’t be spoiling.”
Along with a still-smiling Rand and a muttering William John, Felicia—reluctantly—turned away from the diagrams and started up the stairs in Flora’s wake.
Three steps up, Felicia glanced back—at the board, the gleaming bulk of the engine, the clutter of the workshop.
Facing forward again, she finally understood something of what had driven her father and still drove her brother.
That moment of triumph when one solved a critical issue and got things right…
however fleeting, that feeling of euphoria was addictive.
They trailed into the dining room and sat about the table, helping themselves to the various dishes and, in short order, settling to eat.
An atmosphere of pleased satisfaction reigned, and for a while, they all savored it in silence.
Rand ate and thought—and couldn’t shake, much less sate, his burgeoning curiosity. Eventually deciding there was no reason he couldn’t ask, he looked across the table and caught Felicia’s gaze. “I own to being curious about your talent. Were you much involved in your father’s work?”
She blinked at him. “No. I wasn’t involved at all.” She glanced at William John, then added, “I was never…asked. As I mentioned earlier, I haven’t set foot in the workshop for years. Yesterday was the first time in…a very long time.”
William John’s expression was entirely serious when he said, “Obviously, it’s been far too long since you were there. Thank God you ventured down yesterday.”
“Indeed.” Rand looked from William John to Felicia, then back again.
He hesitated, but the point was too important not to be addressed.
“I’ve worked with a lot of inventors over recent years.
Many work in teams, often of just two members, sometimes three.
Rarely more. Your father was one of the exceptions—he worked alone for most of his life.
But you two… If I was assessing your inventive strengths, I would say that while William John has clearly inherited your father’s aptitude for engineering and assembling mechanical devices, you”—he nodded at Felicia—“have inherited your father’s brilliance in conceptualization and design.
” He looked at William John. “Those are distinctly different sets of skills, and both sets are essential for successful invention.”
William John leaned forward, his gaze going to Felicia.
“Rand’s right. I couldn’t see what the problems were until you pointed them out.
I can fix them once I know what’s amiss, but I couldn’t identify them—and you could.
And you did that not just once, but twice.
” William John sat back and grinned broadly at Felicia.
“You, dear sister, are an inventor, too.”
Felicia felt she should scoff—at least humph and dismiss the notion as nonsensical—yet the warmth of that moment of triumph still lingered in her veins, seductive and alluring, and as she glanced from William John to Rand and read the sincerity in their expressions and open gazes, seduction on a different level bloomed.
They—both of them—saw her and her abilities, her instinctive skills that she’d neglected and ignored for so long, as valuable. As worthy of nurturing, worthy of inclusion. Worthy of encouragement and support.
She knew how she’d gained those skills—she’d absorbed them during her earlier years when she’d run free in her father’s workshop, side by side with William John.
Even after she’d been effectively excluded and had stopped going downstairs, she’d been forced to listen to her father discuss his inventions ad nauseam—of course she’d taken a lot in.
If, now, Rand and William John thought she could contribute to the invention in a real and meaningful way…
It seemed that an entirely unexpected and novel path was opening up before her.
Do you want to take it?
Something in her leapt at the thought.
She blinked and looked down at her plate. Apparently, she truly was her father’s daughter—the notion of working alongside William John in the workshop was powerfully attractive.