other on the balance of the piano, she reflected that circumstances could certainly be much, much worse.
She could be in gaol.
She could be lying dead in the street.
She could be doing needlework in the dim, sunless parlor belonging to her grand-aunts Beaton.
Chapter 26
Over the next week, her motley household settled into its own peculiar rhythm. Mornings were dedicated to market, with accompanying lessons in economics and mathematics. Afternoons were devoted to sharpening the skills of the card players and to the introduction of chemistry and physics. Here Jake’s photographic memory proved invaluable—and it was he who, on the Wednesday after their arrival, finally returned her engineering notebook, her pencils, and dear Linnaeus to her.
“I figure you ent gonna cut out on us now, Lady,” he said gruffly as he handed them over.
“No.” She clutched the books to her chest, resisting the urge to check that no pages had gone missing. “I’m glad to see your confidence in my character is improving.”
He shook his head, and his chocolate-brown eyes met hers. “You either keeps yer word or I goes to the bobbies and tell ’em it was you what kilt Lightning Luke.”
Clearly she did not have to look as far as the road or the river for justice to be meted out to her. She was harboring it right here.
Since the kitchen was now the sole domain of Granny Protheroe, with occasional incursions permitted by Claire and the Mopsies should they be bearing groceries, the front parlor became the laboratory. No more did boys lounge on sofa and floor, drinking rotgut, smoking, and staying out of range of Luke’s gun. Instead, glass tubes and flasks appeared, along with retorts, Bunsen burners, and cells for the creation of electrick current.
Claire had no idea who had built Lightning Luke’s gun, but he or she had obviously been a genius. Her first task was to discover the source of its power. If she could replicate it, then they could make other devices and sell them. She would not be so silly as to replicate the rifle itself—she was neither metallurgist nor fool—but there were other mechanisms that might be devised.
In the meantime, her sketches and equations had to be translated into terms that her ragged compatriots could understand. Some gave up and joined Snouts at the card table. But some, like Jake, persevered even in the face of repeated failure, stubborn as stones and unwilling to allow capricious numbers and persnickety measurements to defeat them. Jake had the makings of a fine chemist. What a pity she had to fight his mistrust at every turn. Ah well. If she could not create a friend where none had been, then at the very least she would create a capable assistant.
In the evenings the poker players scattered to their chosen fields of labor. There they learned variations on the venerable cowboy poker, or invented them, and taught the others when they returned. One of Snouts’s variations in particular, Old Blind Jack, suddenly became the rage in even the most fashionable of London’s card rooms, to the point that strategy diagrams began to appear on the back page of the Evening Standard where illustrations of classic chess moves had held court for years.
Snouts just chuckled and bought his very first velvet waistcoat, tailored to fit.
Upon seeing it the Mopsies immediately demanded their own finery, and Snouts magnanimously handed over twenty pounds as though it were nothing. Claire had seen the account book they’d cobbled together out of the end papers of her books from Wilton Crescent, and in comparison to the money flowing through the boy’s clever hands, twenty pounds was next to nothing.
On the next sunny Saturday, Claire took the Mopsies, Tigg, and Willie to Fortnum & Mason to have them outfitted. Never again would she allow the likes of the chemist in the Haymarket to look at her charges in that manner. And once the salesladies had removed the children’s old clothes to the dustbin, their mouths pruned in disgust, and dressed them from the skin out in clean linen, cotton, and lace for the girls, and practical navy wool for the boys, Claire beamed at them proudly.
“You look as though you were visiting from Buckingham Palace itself.” She smoothed Willie’s sailor collar so that it lay flat across his shoulders. “Even Her Majesty’s grandchildren don’t look as fine.”
“The Princess Alice chose that very dress for her youngest,” the saleslady confided, nodding in Lizzie’s direction. “She took the blue hair ribbons, though, instead of the